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THE 




MORMON TRIALS 



AT 



SALT LAKE CITY. 



Nlj 



BY 



GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND 




NEW YORK: 
AMEEIOAN NEWS COMPANY. 
1871. 




^ 



THE 



MORMON TRIALS 



AT 



SALT LAKE CITY. 



BY 

GEO. ALFEED TOWNSEND 



InTEW YOEK: 

AMEEIOAN NEWS COMPANY, 

1871. 






V 



Letter from Utah to the Cincinnati Commercial, 

OCTOBER, 1871. 



Hon. W. H. HOOPER, 

Delegate in Congress from Utah Territory. 

My dear sir. 

You wished to see the letters I wrote from Salt Lake last month, collected 
in pamphlet. Have your wish ? Your courtesy and hospitality in the Land of the 
Bee, exercised in the two visits I have made you this year, were seconded by the 
best of the Mormon people. You are an Eastern Shore Marylander like myself, 
and I believe in your sincerity, in your faith and sympathize with your devotion to 
your beautiful country and the diligent hands which have made its deserts blossom. 
The march of the children of Israel from Egypt around the corner of the Medi- 
terranean was a little affair compared to the Mormon migration. They were more 
unlettered and idolatrous than your bands, and Moses could not turn his back but 
they fell to worshipping calves and serpents. They conciliated nobody much on the 
way, and were a very unloveable, illiberal, rapacious set of people. They had awk- 
ward notions besides on the marrying point. And yet we, who are preached at 
from childhood out of the old books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, refuse to see any 
equities, wonders, or heroisms in the history and condition of a native church, whose 
legends are no less miraculous. I cannot confess to a deep interest in these ecclesi- 
astical subjects, and your friends Orson Pratt and Dr. Newman appear to me equally 
fatiguing. But I do take pride in the material achievements of the United States, 
however brought about. Religious movements, however motley, have been the 
making of us. Amongst the names of John Robinson, Roger Williams, William 



9-/?^^'^ 



4 LETTER FROM UTAH. 

Penn, George Whitefield, Count Zinzendorf, and Lord Baltimore, founders of 
American communities, the name of Brigham Young will unquestionably stand. 
He has made the boldest, most rapid, and most remarkable colonization we have 
had ; in a political point of view it has been fortunate to us all. I admire force of 
character and success achieved upon no baser principles than faith and industry, and 
I have said so in these letters. As to the camp-meeting jurists and their camp- 
followers out there, I am indifferent to their abuse and proud of their disapproval. 

My friend, your people must stop polygamy, or it will stop Utah. Apart from 
the question of faith, it is a question of the common law. Your most generous 
apologists are only apologists, and they diminish in number every year. Do not 
tempt the democratic passions of a nation whose unanimous prejudice is law and 
power. Be rid of polygamy ; cast out by this course the Federal officials who prey 
upon you, and become an American State in good faith, represented amongst us, and 
blessed by neighborhood rule. 

GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND. 

Washington, November 25, 1871. 



THE MORMON TEIALS. 



THE MORMON CITY AND CHIEF. 

Salt Lake, October 20. 

The train from the East has dashed down 
the wild, barbaric sceneries of Weber and 
Echo Canyons; and, although something of 
Asiatic inhospitality clings to the knobs and 
cliffs, we feel that we are approaching an 
oasis of grass ; this grass we perceive by the 
quick tests of instinct, and it is confirmed by 
occasional kine and sheep ; patches of culti- 
vation slip into the inlets of ravines, and blue 
smoke appears to agitate the wheeling fish- 
hawks; teams show upon the old stage road, 
useless now, except for neighborhood inter- 
communication. At last, with a whoop, 
brakes down, and the crack of rock echoes, 
the mountain gate yields ; snow appears on 
distant ranges ; there is something queer 
and blue hung across the dry sky — it is 
water. The Valley of Salt Lake, covered 
with cattle herds, and the town of Ogden, 
advise us that we are half way between the 
Missouri and the Pacific. 

There is a darting about for baggage, 
many moving people and small traders, and 
a change of a few paces from depot to depot; 
in a little while we have paid our $2.50 in 
gold additional fare, and received in change 
queer, crude shin-plasters of the corporation 



of Salt Lake City, and are moving slowly 
over the Utah Central Railway, every em- 
ploye of which is said be a Saint. This 
being the case, we feel no sense of personal 
responsibility, and so look out upon the green 
waves of the lake destitute of a sail, note the 
frequent Mormon hamlets, the close and 
snowy mountains sending down rapid tor- 
rents for irrigation, and seek to separate the 
sheep from the goats, the Saints from the 
Gentiles. In the last endeavor we unwit- 
tingly classify a methodist doctor of divinity 
as the possessor of four wives, and rate one 
of Tammany Hall's pilgrims as a Mormon 
bishop. Everybody looks queerly at every- 
body else, suspecting one another of the patri- 
archal virtues, and drawing many crude con- 
ceits of this or that innocent passenger sleeping 
all over his premises within the same small 
hours. 

Finally, after more than two hours' ride 
we enter the environs of Salt Lake, among 
the small and bushy orchards of apple, pear, 
and apricot ; the lean and often low, sun- 
dried houses, of a bluish-white color ; and 
wide, straight streets, down whose lazy de- 
clivities the snow-water gurgles, passing at 
every other gate into the vegetable patches 
and the lawns of wheat and wild oats. A 
cleanly depot, well officered, gives us outlet 







fHE IflORMOIV TRIALS. 



to a street full of cabmen and hotel-runners. 
Cries of "Townsend House," "Salt Lake 
House," salute us, and a one-armed Mormon, 
possessing two wives, single-handed, cracks 
his whip, with the reins between his teeth, 
and makes the Avagon fly. We see it all in 
a couple of minutes, the big temple, which 
resembles a tortoise standing on a hundred 
short legs, the ugly wall enclosing the palace 
of Brigham and the new temple, the lone 
theatre, the heathen- seeming city hall, the 
many shops, plastered in front with a monot- 
onous signboard of " Holiness to the Lord," 
and one painted eye, winking at the motto 
as if to satirize it. Then we are set down 
at the "Townsend House," a long, low, sprawl- 
ing hotel, with a comfortable piazza and shade 
trees, growing out of the wooden pavement. 
The only Townsend who can keep a hotel 
stands whittling a stick, and lazily counting 
the number of newly-arriven guests ; it is 
apparent that his hostship sits heavily upon 
his shoulders. Townsend has three wives, 
originated in Maine, and is doing his best to 
multiply our great breed of freemen. We 
feed well at the Townsend House at $4 a 
day, and sleep in the delicious dry air of 
this Wahsatch Valley ; and next day we take 
a warm sulphur plunge bath in the environs 
of the town, the hot water pouring from the 
mountain side into a pool, and a cold shower 
bath standing convenient, like an ice-cream 
at the end of a warm dinner. I observed in 
this bath-house and its dressing-rooms what 
was altogether exceptional in American out- 
houses — no vulgar writings on the wall, no 
sporadic bits of doggerel indited by cowards 
for women to read. The only attestations 
were testimonials in lead pencil to the pleas- 



ures of the bath, and the autographs of irre- 
pressible travelers of vanity. 

The valley and city of Salt Lake are mar- 
vels of patient, unskilled labor, directed by 
a few powerful native minds. The spirit of 
John Smith and the hands of the Puritan 
English meet in this mid-world colony — the 
brawn all peasant, the pluck all Yankee. 
Maine, Vermont, and New York were the 
fiithers of this frontier, and folks out of the 
northwestern races of Europe — people of 
narrow foreheads and animal religious in- 
stincts- fell into the furrows the former 
opened. 

The morning after my arrival I found 
everybody going up to see Brigham Young, 
some accompanied by an introducer, others 
falling in as interlopers. My cliaperon was 
a bright young Mormon editor, as rosy as 
the sun on the mountains, who conducts a 
live salt newsjDaper, possesses a singular fam- 
ily, in that it is limited, and has built the 
first house with a Mansard roof in the heart 
of the continent. If he should feel distressed 
at any of these comments upon the Saints, 
my ingratitude will be great, and his paper 
will score me. 

Passing under the small shade trees, 
across the flowing rills, past Godbe's flaming 
drug store, past Hon. Thomas Fitch's new 
law ofiice, where he sits arranging his books 
with his cultivated wife ; past the market 
where lake trout as big as young pigs lie 
speckled and fresh ; past Delegate Hooper's 
bank, whence he looks out like one of Vel- 
asquez's Spanish gentlemen ; past the chain- 
gang of worthless Gentiles making road with 
manacles dragging after them ; past the thea- 
tre, and up a gentle hill among the painted 



THE MORMOK TRIALS. 



adobe houses — everything flattish, low- set, 
quaint, but not permanent-seeming, as if all 
the town could be blown away by a gale — 
we see the sun shine hotly along the long, 
tall wall which encloses Brigham's palace. 
An eagle over a sunny gateway, a plaster or 
wooden bee-hive, and a lion above the roof, 
denote the clump of dwellings and offices 
just behind the wall, and seen through the 
gateway gap in it, where " President " Young 
keeps state. The scene is like pictures of 
scenery in Tunis or Morocco, hot, yellow, 
sandy, half-barbaric, as if architectural mod- 
els were shaping themselves in a Darwinian 
way from the crude slime. He who would 
reign must not pick his palace, his capital, or 
his subjects. 

A long procession of Eastern sight-seei"s 
is entering the gate, and amongst them are 
many fine young women, many wives, many 
young girls and children, and they pay as 
much respect to Brigham as to the Grand 
Turk. None of them appear to stand in 
dislike of him, because of his much marry- 
ing, and they push aside the Mormon breth- 
ren, who stand reverently off on the porch 
till the hand-shaking shall be done. It is 
truly queer to see that fine Boston belle, tall 
as a queen, with the rose and blush of maiden- 
hood dignifying her for some impending hus- 
band, shake hands with the bland old Blue- 
Beard, whose honeymoons have been more 
numerous than her years. Meekly as Rebec- 
ca at the well she takes his palm, and looks 
honored by his consideration. 

Within we see a snug office, narrow and 
deep, and in the recesses of it some secreta- 
ries, very like other folks' secretaries, writ- 
ing. Everybody about Brigham, we may 



remark, is of a Gentile countenance and a 
worldly, business look; he does not take 
kindly to long faces; several of his confi- 
dential clerks have been associated with the 
Salt Lake theatre. This office is surrounded 
with portraits of the Mormon dignitaries, 
and it contains two large oil portraits — taken 
from life, as I was informed — of Joseph 
Smith and Hyrum Smith. Both wear cleri- 
cal neck-ties and look like country clergy- 
men. 

How powerful is ignorance ! See it tug- 
ging away at the Column Vendome, delighted 
with itself, noble and earnest, wiping out the 
monuments and vindications of our human 
nature, and sparing Heaven the necessity of 
humiliating us. Of all queer enterprises 
which ignorance has undertaken, Mormonism 
excels. It has not yet found itself out. With 
superb leadership, with patient delight, with 
prayer and praise, it goes on dignifying non- 
sense, and by its success almost making us 
infidel to our own religion and country ; for 
what have we done in our knowledge that 
they have not imitated in theirs. Their hum- 
ble apostles have passed the barriers of lan- 
guage, and the crude Danes and Swedes are 
pouring into Utah as well as the English-sj^eak- 
ing nations. Compact, disciplined,^devout, no 
cowards, at times desperate men, yet soft and 
diplomatic, so that they have pacified hostile 
Indians and checkmated the United States, 
they illustrate the nobility of delusion when 
attended with labor, fired with purpose, and 
properly organized. Moses, Roger Williams, 
John Brown, Joe Smith, very different, yet 
like in material results, the politician in all 
of them blended with the fanatic — they put 
in motion greater successors, and, .by the two 



8 



THE MORlflON TRIALS. 



mif^hty inspirers of weak masses — sympathy 
and success — their sects grew to columns 
and their columns to States. 

With his hair nicely oiled in ringlets and 
falling around his heavy neck, hair and beard 
luxuriant, and but a little turned in color, a 
pair of silver spectacles in his hand, and his 
manner all bland, from his half-closed eyes 
to the poise of his knees and feet, Brigham 
Yovnig soothes mankind with seignoral hos- 
pitality. We are all introduced, except one 
young man, who steps forward and says: 

" As there is nobody to make me ac- 
quainted, here is my card. President Young." 

" It is unnecessary, sir," replies Brigham ; 
" quite needless ! Be seated." 

We see he is more perfectly at home than 
anybody in the crowded room, and that he 
has a hard, peremptory voice, j)lausibly toned 
down to reception necessities. Looking not 
more than sixty years of age, he is past that 
period by half a score, and still may have 
twenty years to live. Of a wonderfully ro- 
bust constitution, equal to all responsibilities 
of polygamy, of self-pride, cool self-manage- 
ment, and self-will, with an education chiefly 
religious, and an aptness and ardor for power 
and avarice. Young is wonderfully devised 
for organizing an ignorant and solemn peo- 
ple, and compelling them to be productive 
and docile. 

About everybody of ecclesiastical prom- 
inence in the Church has several wives, and 
such bear themselves with added dignity. 
According to the number of the hens so grandi- 
osely bears himself the cock, and I remarked 
amongst the most polygamous elders, that 
easy self-consciousness and grace of carriage 
becoming what are truly " ladies' men." 



THE FIRST CONVICTION 
POLYGAMY. 



FOR 



Salt Lake, October 24, 1871. 

To-day Thomas Hawkins, English, from 
Birmingham, better known around Salt Lake 
as "Tummus Awkeens," is to be sentenced 
in the best elocution of which Judge Mc- 
Kean is capable, to the Territorial Peniten- 
tiary for a term of years. 

The oflense of Thomas was somewhat 
uncommon — committing adultery with his 
wife, Elizabeth Mears, on complaint of his 
wife Harriet Hawkins, better known as 
Arriet Awkeens. He was also arraigned in 
the indictment for the same oflTense with his 
third and last wife, Sarah Davis, but no wit- 
nesses were adduced as to the criminal act, 
owing to the fact that Sarah quartered in the 
upper part of the house, and there was no 
way to observe what happened there, except 
by looking down the chimney. Voices, it is 
true, had been heard in that quarter, as of 
people sitting up or otherwise, toward morn- 
ing; but it was somewhat singular that, 
although the first wife, complainant, had 
lived under the polygamous roof for several 
years, she swore that she had never beheld 
the direct offense charged but once, even with 
Mears, and then peeked in at a window on 
purpose. 

As you are all anxious to realize this 
scene, I relate it below with all its atmospheric 
and personal surroundings. 

" Hear ye ! hear ye ! The United States 
Court for the Third Judicial District of Utah 
is now in session. Hats off"! Spectators 
will get off" the jury bench ! " 

These were the remarks of the Deputy 



THE MORMOIV TRIALS. 



9 



Marshal Furmaii, who is intermarried with 
Mormons, but a prosecutor of the Saints, and 
brother-in-law of Billy Appleby, United 
States Commissioner in Bankruptcy. The 
Mar.shal, M. T. Patrick, had gone to Southern 
Utah to shoot snipe, prospect a mine, and 
arrest a Mormon Bishop. 

The Judge on the bencli, J. B. McKean, 
at once cleared his throat and looked over 
the bar and the audience. The Judge wore 
a blue coat, and was trim as a bank presi- 
dent. He sat upon a wooden chair behind 
a deal table, raised half a foot above the 
floor ; the Marshal stood behind a remnant 
of dry-goods box in one corner, and the jury 
sat upon two broken settees under a hot 
stove-pipe and behind the stove. They were 
intelligent, as usual with juries, and re- 
sembled a parcel of baggage smashers warm- 
ing themselves in a railroad depot between 
ti'ains. The bar consisted of what appeared 
to be a large keno party keeping tally on a 
long pine table. When some law books 
were brought in after a while, the bar wore 
that unrecognizable look of religious services 
about to be performed before the opening of 
the game. 

The audience sat upon six rows of dam- 
aged settees, and a standing party formed 
the back-ground, over whose heads was seen 
a great barren, barn-like area of room in the 
rear, filled with the debris of some former 
fair. One chair on the right of the Judge 
was deputed to witnesses. The entire fur- 
niture of the place might have cost eleven 
dollars at an auction where the bidding was 
high. The room itself was the second story 
of a lively stable, and a polygamous jackass 
and several unrt'generate Lamanite mules in 
2 



the stalls beneath occasionally interrupted 
the Judge with a bray of delight. The au- 
dience was composed entirely of men, per- 
fectly orderly and tolerably ragged, and 
spitting surprisingly little tobacco juice ; al- 
most all of them Mormons, with a stray 
miner here and there mingled in, wearing a 
revolver on his hip and a paper collar under 
his long beard. 

At the bar table, on one side sat Baskins 
and Maxwell, the prosecutors, the former 
frowsy, cool and red headed, the latter look- 
ing as if he had overslept himself for a week, 
and got up mad. On the opposite side sat 
Tom Fitch, late member of Congress from 
Nevada, a rotund cosmopolitan young man, 
with a bright, black eye, a piece of red flan- 
nel around his bad cold of a throat, and great 
quantities of forensic eloquence wrapped 
away under his mustache. Behind him was 
A. Miner, the leading Mormon lawyer, 
turned a trifle gray, and thinned down in 
flesh very much since Judge McKean got on 
the bench ; for the Judge uses Miner as the 
scapegoat for the sins of the bar, and threat- 
ens him with Camp Douglas and a fine every 
time he has a toothache. Whenever Miner 
gets up to apologize, the Judge makes him 
sit down, and when he sits down the Judo-e 
looks at him with his resinous black eyes as 
if he had committed solely and alone the 
Mountain Meadow massacre. Miner is the 
Smallbones of the Court, and is fed on judi- 
cial herrings. The other lawyers are all 
Gentiles, except Hosea Stout and one Snow, 
of the firm of Snovv & Hayne,-a Vermonter. 
Yonder is a square-built man with cropped 
hair, ex-Governor Mann, Fitch's partner ; 
they divide the leading business here, al- 



10 



THE MORMON TRIALS. 



though resident only six months, with Hemp- 
stead & Kirkpatrick, the former a slow, 
serious military officer, and the latter a dark- 
eyed Kentuckian. Keutuckian also is Mar- 
shall, the Ancient Pistol of the bar, rare and 
stupendous in speech, and chiefly admired 
by his partner Carter, from Maryland. 
Marshall once did a good deal of Brigham's 
business, but, with the impartial eye of a 
lawyer, he afterward sued Brigham for God- 
by's fee, and lost the better client. Nothing 
is a bereavement to Marshall, however, for, 
as he frequently reminds the Court, the 
jurisprudence of the country reaches its peri, 
helion in the names of " Kent, Choate and 
Marshall, of which latter I am a part." 
Smith and Earl and De Wolf are about the 
remainder of the Utah bar — a shrewd, clever 
bevy of pioneer chaps, some of whom draw 
large contingent fees from mining suits, 
others encouraged to settle here by Brigham, 
who does not like litigious emulation amongst 
his own folks. He wants his good pleaders 
to be preachers. 

As Miner is the victim of the Court, the 
Court in turn is the victim of Baskins, the 
Prosecuting Attorney "pro tern. Baskins 
comes from Ohio, and gets his red hot temper 
from his hair. He is related to have shot 
somebody in Ohio, and about six months 
ago he scaled the ermine slopes of Judge 
Hawley, one of the three luminaries of this 
bench. The Judge, by an order, came bet- 
ween Baskins and a fee. Baskins threw the 
paper on the floor, and ground it with his 
boot-heel into an inoffensive tobacco quid. 
The Judge, who is slender, conscious, and 
respects himself and his rulings, told Mr. 
Baskins he would fine him. 



" Go ahead with your fine ! " said Bas- 
kins, " you're of no account." 

The Judge fined Baskins one hundred 
dollars, and sent him to Camp Douglas for 
ten days. Baskins twitched the order out of 
the Judge's hands and said that beine: an 
" old granny " the Judge should forthwith be 
kicked down stairs. At this Barkins threw 
open the door to expedite the descent of the 
venerable man, and rushed upon him, like 
Damon upon Lucullus. The Marshal inter- 
posed to save the author of so many learned 
and long opinions, and Baskins went to the 
Camp in custody. But as this notable Bench 
in Utah never consult together, Strickland 
agreeing with McKean in everything and 
Hawley in nothing, Judge McKean let Bas- 
kins out on habeas corpus in four days, and 
Baskins disdained to pay his fine. It is Bas- 
kins, therefore, who insists, as Prosecuting 
Attorney, that the laws of the United States 
and the Courts thereof must be respected in 
Utah. 

As for McKean's two Associate Judges, 
they are off holding District Court at Provo 
and Beaver, Hawley harassing some rural 
justice of the peace w^ith his last printed 
opinion, and Strickland playing billiards for 
drinks, between sessions, with Bill Nye. But 
Judge McKean himself does not use tobacco 
nor a billiard cue in any form ; his sole re- 
creation is to practice elocution and parlor 
suavity in anticipation of his appearance in 
the United States Senate from the State of 
New York. A trim, apprehensive, not un- 
sagacious man, with a great, burning mission 
to exalt the horn of his favorite denomina- 
tion upon the ruins of the Mormon Bishop- 
rick, McKean is resolved in advance that 



THE MORMOK TRIALS. 



11 



everybody is guilty who can keep awake un- 
der Orson Pratt's sermons. 

There stand the guilty fold, without the 
bar of the court — most of them look as if 
they wanted a new razor and a square meal 
— the Mormon rank and file. Grave and 
listening, and so respectful as to irritate the 
prosecuting attorneys very much (so that 
they would like to make premeditated good 
behavior a conspiracy punishable at law), 
these Mormons, could they speak aloud, 
would swell a chorus profuse and unintelli- 
gible as on the eve of the miraculous Pente- 
cost — Dane and Welshman, Norwegian and 
Finn, Westphalian and Belgian, hard, nasal 
Yankee, and wide-mouthed Northumbrian — 
lads from the collieries of Newcastle, the 
purlieus of London, and the mills of Brad- 
ford, they look upon the United States in a 
blue coat with a lead pencil in its hand as if 
it were the Man of Sin, and combined under 
the same baldish sconce the peculiarities of 
Guy Fawkes and Judge Jeffreys, Simple 
people in the main, who, with all their re- 
gard to the command to increase and multi- 
ply, feared the United States census takers 
as partners in their persecution, and cut 
down the returns of their population by 
sheer shyness, from 130,000 to 86,000 odd. 
Docile people, as well, though not without 
the courage of the poor, so that when on the 
late occasion of the great Methodist camp 
meeting, Brigham said to them in the Taber- 
nacle : " I want you all to go to this camp 
meeting, and listen to what is said ! " they 
filled it to over-flowing every day, but the 
mourners' bench remained empty as a lion's 
platter. And when, on one occasion only, 
at some harangue upon polygamy, a mutter 



arose over that great congregation, Brigham, 
himself present, stood up and waved his 
finger, and the complaint hushed to utter 
peace. People, also, who dance and waltz 
between religious benedictions, and yet can 
listen four hours in ardent delight to dry 
dissertations and discussions in their Taber- 
nacle, which might make nature snore in her 
processes. How infinite are the possibilities 
of our nature when we reflect that these 
grave, unrebellious people, the w^aifs and 
findings of all lands, many of them dignified 
in apparel and culture, and steadily ascend- 
ing in the scale of comfort and possessions, 
hold still with the tenacity of a moral pur- 
pose to the loose and spreading life of poly- 
gamy, preferring this fantastic reproduction 
like the Banyan's branches to the straight 
and peaceful unity of the European family. 
I saw in the court a Jew, lineal descendant 
of the old Patriarchs whom these Mormons 
delight to exemplify. His dark, shining 
eyes^ aquiline beak, and wavy coarseness of 
hair made a strong contrast with those 
Saxon and Scandinavian races, fair-haired, 
and highly-colored around him. He had 
marched down through two thousand years 
of wandering to accord with the century and 
Europe. And these Europeans had marched 
back six thousand years to resume the civili- 
zation the Jew had abandoned. What a 
feast for skepticism is this. But whoever 
looked closely could see the end of all this 
near at hand, unless fanned by irritation to 
fanaticism again. The weary faces, long 
and hollow, told of responsibilities too 
burdensome and of bodies overtaxed. The 
bright lights which shine in the face of him 
who submits to the life and customs ap- 



12 



THE MORIflOX TRIALS. 



proved by time and wisdom, were often 
darkened here. From the windows of the 
court, the rolling or serrated line of moun- 
tains, enfolding a valley like the lawn of 
Paradise, suggested for different men and 
women, and a life bounded by fewer neces- 
sities and wider opportunities for them all ; 
a life consonant with the literatures of all 
these people, consonant with Chiistian art 
and promising a j)eriod of rest between 
labor and death. Who can look at this 
many-wedded manhood and envy it, or be- 
lieve that its direction can be prolonged be- 
yond the breaking of the darkness out of 
which this Mormon wife comes, like the 
feeble beam of the morning near at hand? 

In a chair sat Mrs, Hawkins, a dark- 
haired, black-eyed woman from Birmingham, 
where she was converted to Mormonism 
about thirty years ago, and married to 
Hawkins, also a Mormon at the time, in an 
English parish church. Mrs. Hawkins 
w^ears a plain bonnet, a delaine dress, and 
drops her H's all over the floor. She refers 
to Hawkins as " my husband," and seems 
thoroughly aroused to the necessity of cor- 
recting him for the recreations of his maturer 
age. In short, Mrs. Hawkins has two suits 
against Thomas. This one is for adultery, 
and the next will be for divorce. Mrs. 
Hawkins is accompanied by her daughter, 
Lizzie Hawkins, a timid, embarrassed girl of 
about sixteen years, and while the mother is 
a prompt and rather bright witness, the 
daughter is measurably dumb. The daugh- 
ter never saw anything wrong; she knew 
Elizabeth Mears' children were her father's, 
because they called him father, but she 
never saw anything in the Mears and Davis 



end of the house, because she never went 
there except on a visit in daytime. 

Thomas Hawkins looks like one who 
might enjoy married life, and yet be a 
rather mcivn husband. A square English 
head, bulging in the big, high, dwarf's fore- 
head, plastered straight aci'oss from ear to 
ear Avith thin, long, yellow hair, which per- 
mits half his pale head to stand naked in 
front, and still be no bald-head ; a light-blue, 
animal eye, which would pick out a woman 
quickest in a landscape ; not an athletic 
body, and that clad in light, worn clothes ; 
silent, attentive, and at times uneasy, during 
the trial — such is the meager hero of three 
marriages, brought up seven years after date 
to answer the charge of adultery. I have 
understood that Hawkins stands in doubtful 
odor among his church people for not equal- 
izing himself more among his families, both 
socially and financially. The common ex- 
pression among the Mormons is — 

"There's wrong on both sides in that 
fomily ;" but the inevitable addenda is — 
"just as in plenty of monogamous families," 

Here is Mrs. Hawkins' testimony, in 
part, showing that all is not tranquil in 
those households, and that dissolution is pro- 
ceeding of itself more rapidly than interfer- 
ence can promote it: 

Q. Did you ever have any conversation 
with Thomas Hawkins on the subject of his 
living with these women in the house 1 " 

A. Yes, sir, 

Q. What did hC say about if? 

A. He said they were his wives. 

Q. Did you ever have more than one 
conversation ? 

A. I have had many a thousand. 



THE MORMOIV TRIALi^. 



13 



Q. State their substance. 

A. Well, in the first place, he allowed 
he was doing religious duties, and he allowed 
that he had got to live with some one else, 

Q. Did he give you any reason why he 
had to live with some person else ? 

A. Well, no reason ; only he allowed 
that he had got to live with some one else ! 
That I had had my day, and he had got to 
have some one else. 

Q. Did you say you could consent to 
that? 

A. No sir, I did not, 

Q. What did you say to him 1 

A. I have told him that it was a damned 
bad trick, and that I did not believe in any 
such damned doctrine. 

Q. Well, what did he say? What did 
he do? 

A. Well, it didn't matter. If I didn't 
like it, I could do the other thing. He ap- 
peared to feel very indifferent about it, and 
1 suppose if I had sanctioned what he wanted 
me to, and would have cleared out, that 
would have suited him, I suppose. 

Miner Smallbones), the Mormon lawyer : 
You need not state what you suppose. State 
ihe facts. 

Witness : I am speaking the facts, I am 
not to be insulted by you, Mr, Miner ! 

At this point, when it appeared to be 
coming out exactly how the inside of a 
heavenly mansion was conducted, and how 
objecting damsels were chastised, the law- 
yers made objections, and we returned to 
the matter of the adultery. 

One other witness was called, the brother- 
in-law of Hawkins, who flew off in high 
dudgeon at the idea that a man's wife was 



" anything else " but his wife. He couldn't 
see any difference in the order of wives ; 'e 
didn't know whether Mears was the second 
or sixtieth wife ; it was none of 'w business, 
&c. 

The audience laughed and applauded 
only once when Mrs. Hawkins testified that 
her husband's lawyer came to her to solicit 
a compromise, and said that unless she 
settled, the lawyers would get all the prop- 
erty. To tliis she replied that the lawyers 
might as well have it as " 'is woman," 

There seemed to be no feeling in the 
town except regret at the wife's suit for 
divorce, but a notion that the prosecution 
for adultery was malicious, and set on by 
the court and its favorite lawyers. 

The oratory was mixed in the case. 
Maxwell, who was admitted at his own 
solicitation to assist Baskins in the prosecu- 
tion, making the point against the Mormons 
that in twenty-two years their Legislature 
had never made a statute validating poly- 
gamy even by inference. To this Muller, 
the Mormon lawyer, replied that marr;age 
was not a civil, but an ecclesiastical rite in 
Utah, that polygamy was established prior 
to the formation of any American govern- 
ment here, and relied upon a clause of the 
treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, whereby the 
newly annexed inhabitants were guaranteed 
against interference with their religion The 
speeches of Maxwell and Baskins were bold 
and acrid, but the large Mormon audience 
listened without a murmur. 

The reliance of the prisoner and his 
friends was upon Hon. Thomas Fitch, who 
came into the case late, and made an address 
which extorted admiration on every side, as 



14 



THE ]lfOR]?IO]V TRIALS. 



well for its frankness as its legal incision. 
He is the best public orator and pleader 
west of the Rocky Mountains since the 
death of General Baker, and in the opening 
of his address ho proclaimed himself an op- 
ponent of polygamy on every ground, and 
affirmed it to be a cruel and uncompensating 
system of barbarism, whether indorsed by 
former patriarchs or latter saints. 

But the prisoner was on trial for adultery, 
and not for polygamy, and under a statute 
passed by a Territorial Legislature, three- 
fourths of whom were polygamists, and 
signed by Brigham Young himself, as 
governor, nineteen years ago. This statute 
fixes a penalty so severe as to show that the 
adultery meant was that committed outside, 
or in injury of the sort of marriage relation 
acknowledged here, prescribing from three 
hundred to one thousand dollars fine, and 
from three to twenty years imprisonment. 
To carry out its relentless purposes, this 
court — which had announced itself as a 
United States Court, and nothing else, and 
had quashed all territorial acts as to Probate 
Courts, selections of juiies, divorces, &c. — 
now revives this obsolete statute, resumes 
for this object only a territorial jurisdiction, 
and punishes polygamy with the penalty of 
adultery. 

Mr. Fitch's argument was that, as the 
Legislature had not defined adultery, the 
jury had a right to interpret the meaning of 
this statute according to the intent of the 
Legislature — the intent constituting the gist 
of the offense. The prisoner was clearly 
unaware that his ofiense was adultery ac- 
cording to any law enacted in Utah. The 
conmiand, " Thou shalt not commit adult- 



ery," was delivered to a polygamous people, 
and engraved upon stone by the husband of 
three wives. The same public opinion and 
religious inculcation which enacted the 
statute against adultery, married the prisoner 
to his wives, and honored the children of 
them equally. The rulings of the courts in 
Utah, both probate and district, for twenty 
years, had been in accordance with this 
theory of marriage, and now, seven years 
after committing the act charged with his 
second wife, '• a rusty law is drawn from its 
antique sheath," and made retroactive upon 
this man. The polygamists on trial in the 
person of the prisoner had left civilized 
places and entered the desert, followed by 
the women, to attest their belief in this dis- 
pensation, and obey it out of the way of the 
people. 

Here the eloquent advocate touched the 
audience to tears, and as he proceeded, an 
audible " boo-hoo " went over the court- 
room, two jury -men joining in the chorus, to 
the great alarm of the judge and Baskins, 
who feared that, unaware, some Mormons 
might have been insinuated into that pack- 
ing-box. When Mr. Fitch concluded, there 
seemed a possibility, despite the clearness of 
Mrs. Hawkins' evidence as to the cohabita- 
tion between Hawkins and Mrs. H. No. 2, 
that the jury might hang. 

To make this impossible, Judge McKean 
delivered a harangue to the jury answering 
every point made by the defense. It was a 
speech of three quarters of an hour, and 
amounted to an exhoitation to convict. As 
to the intent of the Territorial Legislature, 
he said, that was no more to be conjectured 
than that magna charia could be interpreted 



THE mORMON TRIALS. 



15 



away because King John, its grantor, was a 
tyrant; a statute against gambling might be 
similarly disproved because the enactors 
were proven to play at chance. 

The Mormon paper, the Herald, rendered 
Judge McKean's charge and conduct of the 
trial as follows, on the following morning : 

" You have your duties, gentlemen, and 
I have mine. My duty is to pick you out 
and pack you in ; to fix the trial at such a 
time as will be least convenient to the de- 
fendant ; to exclude all evidence that may 
help him, and to admit all evidence that 
may hurt him ; to rule all points of law 
against him ; to pick out from acts of Con- 
gress and acts of the Utah Assembly those 
laws which, combined, may convict him ; to 
be first a United States Justice's Court, and 
then a Territorial Justice's Court, and vice 
versa, as the exigencies of the case may de- 
mand ; to dramatize the case, and elocution- 
ize my opinions ; to follow my instructions 
from Rev. Dr. Newman, and avenge his de- 
feat at the Tabernacle ; in short, gentlemen, 
my duty is to secure a conviction." 

Directed by this peremptory charge, the 
jury found a verdict of guilty \n one hour, 
and it was heard by the large audience, 
standing with breathless eagerness and 
silence. As this case came up on complaint 
of a wife, and the testimony as to the second 
cohabitation was clear, it was thought to be 
the easiest case to obtain a conviction, and 
made comparatively little excitement. The 
streets of Salt Lake were quiet, as usual, and 
no knots of people discussed the affair unless 
in privacy. 

The cases of Brigham Young, Wells, and 



Cannon, are accompanied by no complaint 
from any wife, and are regarded by the Mor- 
mons as deliberate attempts to invite resist- 
ance and inaugurate persecution. 

About the close of the trial, the only dis- 
turbance occurred between the reporter for 
the anti-Mormon organ and a deputy mar- 
shal. It was on the supposed occasion of 
the administration of sentence, and, either to 
express sympathy with the prisoner or to 
find out what might be the penalty of such 
wedlock, the room was filled with Mormon 
women. Suddenly a man came up stairs 
from the livery stable, and said that the 
floor showed signs of coming down. At 
this, the court was profoundly exercised. 
The deputy marshal, under pretence of 
regulating admissions, got near the door, 
and just at this juncture, the Gentile reporter 
strutted in in search of items. The marshal 
gave him an item by tearing his coat off his 
back, in the unfounded supposition that the 
coat was not too rotten to pitch him down 
stairs by it. Quantities of lead pencils and 
free tickets to the theater strewed the court- 
room in an instant. The reporter, to whom 
a thousand yeais were but as a day, struck 
the marshal, and they clinched and fell down 
stairs, the marshal on top. The reporter 
was handed over to the Mormon police, and 
discharged that afternoon by a Mormon 
judge, on the ground that there was no 
breach of the peace committed outside of the 
court-room. This excitement and the fact 
that Judge McKean had not committed the 
sentence to memory so as to render it effect- 
ive, led to a postponement of Hawkins' 
sentence. 



IG 



THE MORMOX TRIALS. 



THE FEDERAL ENEMIES OF THE 
SAINTS. 



Salt Lake City, October 23. 

There arc now two places in Salt Lake 
City of more superstitious consequence even 
than Brigham Young's Lion House or Camp 
Douiilas. These are the Wahsatch Club — the 

a 

headquarters of the anti-Mormon " Ring" — 
and the United States District Court room, 
over a livery stable. 

Except for the good counsel prevailing 
among the Mormons, and the powerful con- 
trol Brigham Young has over these people, 
the $70,000,000 of real and personal prop- 
erty here, the accumulations of twenty-two 
years, and the homesteads of one hundred 
and thirty thousand people, might to-day 
have been ashes and desert, and the suppo- 
sitious mineral wealth in this territory would 
have lain hidden in the mountain ores for 
half a century. The Union Pacific Railroad, 
as a separate incorporation with an indepen- 
dent trade, would have been bankrupt or 
worse. Our half-way house to the Pacific, 
the only oasis of any capacity or longevity 
in the Great American Desert, would have 
relapsed to plains and benches of alkali. We 
should have lost from Utah the only type of 
human labor with the patience, frugality, 
simplicity and directed industry to keep it 
under development. , And we should have 
expedited the extermination of polygamy at 
the cost of more than $100,000,000 principal 
money, by only about two or three years. 
The Chief Justice of this territory, a wilder 
fanatic than Orson Pratt or John Taylor, 
would have achieved a reputation upon this 



lamentable commercial transaction, and 
might have assumed to run against Roscoe 
Conkliug for the next vacant senatorship 
from New York, whence he came. But 
sound statesmanship, the common interest 
which in the end surrounds and regulates 
morals, our pride of empire and our jeal- 
ousy of law, precedent and equity, would 
have suffc'red in the catastrophe, and there 
would have been a reaction, political and 
historical, against the reckless actors in it. 

For, according to the best information I 
have been able to obtain, the Mormons, rank 
and file, believing that neither law nor equity 
were to be observed in dealing with them for 
the future, had meditated a wholesale deser- 
tion of their country and an occupation of 
Mexican soil, where they had frequently 
been invited, and where, with their arms, 
discipline, cattle, and fortitude, they could 
maintain themselves as victoriously as had 
Texas under Houston and Crockett. 

They were saved from this act of devo- 
tion and despair by the abnegation of their 
leaders and thinkers, men who had proved 
their resources thrice before under worse 
conditions of exodus. Brigham Young, the 
tlieocrat of this church ; Daniel H. Wells, 
Mayor of Salt Lake City, and George Q. 
Cannon, an editor of influence and a man of 
property and force, appeared before the 
Coui t and gave bonds to stand trial on the 
charge of lewd and lascivious conduct and 
cohabitation with divers wom.en. At the 
same time, the strong instinct for peace in 
the Mormon counsels compelled one Thomas 
Hawkins, an English member of the Church, 
to submit to indictment, trial, and, if required, 
punishment, on the ground of adultery with 



THE mORItlOIV TRIAI.S. 



17 



his later wives, which he has done with dig- 
nity worthy a better cause, 

I have seen the whole of this trial, being 
present in Salt Lake City upon commercial 
business, and, although on the occasion of 
my last visit here, four months ago, I wrote 
probably as severe strictures upon the 
essence of this civilization, as any tourist, I 
have found the Mormons anxious to encour- 
age the slightest disposition to represent 
them to the Eastern people, and without 
resentment for expressions of opinion. 

Near the Townsend House, the principal 
hotel of Salt Lake, and a Mormon's property, 
in a pleasant two-story adobe house of a gray 
color, is a lounging place and mess-room 
called the Wahsatch Club, denominated here 
by three-fourths of the Gentiles as the "Jump- 
ers' Club," in allusion to the tendency of the 
judicial judges and their satellites to "jump" 
or possess without right and by force the 
neighboring valuable mining claims. 

In this club meet by accident or design 
the members of the Federal Administration 
who are moving on the Mormon works, and 
at the same time upon the substantial inter- 
ests of Utah, As they have written them- 
selves up copiously for the Eastern press, 
they may not object to taking this current 
and third-party opinion of their qualifica- 
tions. I give them in the order of brains 
and consequence. 

1. Chief Justice of Utah, J. B. McKean, 
of New York State ; an officer in the volun- 
teer army during the war, and a prominent 
Methodist, formerly, it is said, a preacher. 
McKean came here upon a crusade against 
polygamy, and his fair abilities and great 
vanity have carried him through it thus far 
3 



with about equal flourish and fearlessness. 
He is a wiry, medium-sized man, with a tall 
baldish head, gray side-locks, and very black, 
sallow eyes, at times resinous in color, like 
tar-water. He looks, however, to be in the 
prime of strength and will ; has never com- 
municated with Brigham Young personally 
since he arrived, and is absorbed in the pur- 
pose of intimidating the Mormon Church or 
breaking it up. His behavior on the bench 
has been despotic and extra-judicial to the 
last degree, and he has also been unfortunate 
enough to compromise his reputation by min- 
ing speculations which have come before his 
court, and received influential consideration 
there, 

2, R. N. Baskins, the author of what is 
called in Congress the " Cullom Bill," and 
at present temporary Prosecuting Attorney 
before McKean's Court ; a lean, lank, rather 
dirty and frowsy, red-headed young man, but 
a lawyer of shrewdness and coolness, and in- 
flamed against Mormonism, He said, in a 
speech before McKean last Friday, that if 
Joseph Smith had been a eunuch he would 
never have received the revelation on poly- 
gamy. To this the Mormons retort that 
Baskins is married to a woman for whom 
he procured a divorce from a former hus- 
band, &c. 

3. George R. Maxwell, an ex-officer 
from Michigan, with a game leg, a strong, 
dissipated face, and Register of the Land 
Office here ; an indomitable man, but ac- 
cused of corruption, and a chronic runner 
for Congress against delegate W. H. Hoop- 
er ; thinks Congress is a vile body, because 
it will not put Hooper out of Congress for 



18 



THE mORmON TRIALS. 



his creed, as promptly as Judge McKean 
would put him off a jury. 

4. J. H. Taggait, United States Asses- 
sor ; a person who was bitten by a dog 
some time ago, and charged the bite to Mor- 
mon assassins. Imperfect, indeed doubtful 
record in the army as surgeon, and chiefly 
potential as a gadder and street gossip 
against the Saints. 

5. O. J. Hollister, United States Col- 
lector ; uninteresting man, who married the 
half sister of the Vice-President, and, al- 
though a determined anti-Mormon, does not 
agree with several of the Ring ; the same 
is the case with several others ; all want to 
be boss. Hollister deluges the Eastern 
press, from Chicago to New York, with let- 
ters of locums picked up at hearsay, and 
hardly reliable enough for a comic j)aper. 

6. Dennis T. Toohy, editor and late 
partner with Hollister in the Corinne Re- 
porter ; an Irishman, witty and abusive, and 
incapable of working in harness. The Ring 
tactics have generally been to combine the 
Godbyites and the Gentiles in a "Liberal" 
or anti-Brighain party ; but at a meeting of 
the two sets some time ago, Toohy denounced 
polygamy so violently that Godby and Eli 
B. Kelsey, apostates but polygamists, rose 
up and resented it. 

7. Frank Kenyon, proprietor of the Re- 
view, a paper which has superseded the Salt 
Lake Tribune in irritating the Mormons ; a 
Montana man, and with so little fortitude 
that when the indictment of Brigham was 
proposed, he sent his domestic treasures to 
San Francisco. 

8. C. M. Hawley, Associate Justice with 
McKean, but not servile, like 0. F. Strick- 



land, the other Judge. Hawley bores people 
on the streets by reading his long opinions 
to them. He nearly made O. P. Morion a 
polygamist lately by reading to him opinions 
the other way. 

8-^. C. M. Hawley, jr., son of the afore- 
said, a weakish, flop- whiskered, insubstantial 
young man, who stood challenged at the polls 
in Salt Lake recently, with too many horns 
"into" him, and was arrested by the city 
police and confined two hours ; he now has 
a suit against the corporation for twenty -five 
thousand dollars damages, and one of the 
usual packed juries may award it. 

9. George A. Black, Secretary of the Ter- 
ritory, author of the proclamation against the 
Fourth of July here. 

10. George L. Woods, of Oregon, the 
Governor ; a red-headed, gristly, large man, 
of little mental ' heft,' Woods refused to 
let the Mormon militia celebrate the Fourth 
of July last year, and ordered, through Black, 
General De Trobriand to turn out his re^u- 
lar army garrison and fire on the Nauvoo 
Legion if they disobeyed. De Trobriand, 
who has a contempt for the Gentile Ring, 
like all the regular army officers, answered : 

" If I do this thing, there is to be no con- 
fusion nor debate about it upon the actual 
field. I shall parade my troops down to the 
Mormon line ; the second order, in proper 
succession, will be, ' Fire !' the last order 
you must give." 

Woods refused to take the responsibility, 
and threatened to make General Grant re- 
move De Trobriand. The latter told Woods 
to go to the devil, and said it was an outrage, 
anyway, to forbid the Mormons to celebrate 
the Fourth, as they had been doing for tAventy 



THE MORMOK TRIALS. 



19 



years. De Trobriand was removed as soon 
as Dr. Newman, the Methodist preacher, 
could see Grant, and General Morrow was 
ordered here. 

This is about all the Ring, except Strick- 
land, a Michigander on the bench; William 
Appleby, the Register in Bankruptcy, and 
R. H. Robertson, Strickland's law partner, 
seeking practice under the protection of the 
courts. 

These people represent the average char- 
acter of Territorial officers; political adven- 
turers, for the most part, paid the low sti- 
pends allowed in the wisdom of the Federal 
Government, and possessing in common only 
an intense feeling, begotten of conviction and 
interest, against every feature of the Mormon 
Church. Polygamy is the objective feature, 
but the city and Territory completely out of 
debt and both with plethoric treasuries, the 
great cooperative store paying two per cent, 
a month and yet unincorporated, and the 
value of Salt Lake City property, for which 
a title has never yet been given, appear to 
offer wonderful opportunities for plunder in 
case an outbreak can be devised. Utah, 
although the richest and most populous Ter- 
ritory in the Union, really affords less politi- 
cal pap than any other. But the mining 
enthusiasm, the large trade of Salt Lake, the 
elasticity of real estate here, and the large 
acquisitions of Brigham Young and others 
in the church, give lawyers in favor with 
the United States Courts unusual chances to 
thrive, and the anti-Mormon lawyers and 
the Court make a close society — so close 
that some time ago Justice McKean in the 
case of the Velocipede Mine kept the whole 
bar of Salt Lake from appearing against his 



interest, and lawyers had to be sent for from 
Nevada. 

In this Ring McKean is the organizing 
spirit, and Baskins, whom McKean made 
Prosecutor, is the executive arm. The 
Court has lost its superstition in the Ter- 
ritory, and in criminal cases affecting Mor- 
mons the Saints say that their only chance 
is to fee the Ring lawyers, while the public 
morals of Salt Lake, which, up to two years 
ago, barring polygamy, had extorted the 
admiration of travelers, are nearly as bad 
as elsewhere in Nevada or Idaho. The 
Court has given moral support to unlicensed 
liquor dealers, and encouraged them to resist 
paying the hitherto almost prohibitory rates 
of license. One Engelbrecht, having set the 
license law at defiance, recently had his stock 
destroyed by Mayor Wells' police, and he 
brought suit against the city and got sixty 
thousand dolhirs damages. W. S. Godby, 
leader of the Godbyites, but a liquor dealer 
and a polygamist, also applied to Judge 
KcKean for an injunction to restrain the 
city from suing him for violating the license 
law. When McKean was applied to for a 
dissolution of the injunction, he put it in his 
pocket, saying he would hold it under advise- 
ment, while meantime Godby goes on selling 
liquor. Prostitution, taking encouragement 
from these cases, has quadrupled in Salt 
Lake, every bagnio being composed of Gen- 
tile women. A day or two ago a street- 
walker was arrested for drunkenness and 
swearing, but some of her friends, the poker 
players at the Wahsacht Club, prompted her 
to sue the city for ten thousand dollars. 

In short, the Officeholders' Ring, led by 
the United States Court, and supported by 



20 



THE ITIORMO^ TRIALS. 



the liquor and lewd interests, and all who 
want to throw off city taxation, is engaged 
in an unequal grapple with the municipal 
corporation. The East is liberally supplied 
with inflammatory correspondence, charging 
mutiny upon the Mormons, in despite of the 
fact that Brigham Young has submitted to 
arrest and appeared, unattended, in comt. 
The garrison has been increased to about 
1,200 men, unwilling allies of the Ring. A 
large amount of capital invested in the rich 
argentiferous galena mines has been diverted 
to Nevada, Idaho, and Montana ; and other 
foreign capital, apprehensive of a war, has 
declined to come here. Brigham Young, 
with whom the United States has dealt upon 
terms of encouragement in a hundred ways 
while as much of a polygamist as now — 
using him to build telegraph and railw^ays, 
to furnish supplies, to repress Indians, and 
carry mails — and which appointed him first 
Governor of Utah and continued him in the 
place for seven years, — this old man, at 
seventy years of age, is suddenly admon- 
ished that he is a criminal, and put on trial 
for offenses committed twenty years ago. 

And yet, it is capable of demonstration 
that polygamous marriages have declined 
between September 1, 1869, and September 
1, 1871, in the remarkable proportion of one 
hundred to six. That is, the months of 1869 
and the corresponding ones of 1871, prior to 
September, show the decrease, and this is 
due to public opinion, to Gentile influx, to 
commercial intercourse, the awakened con- 
sciousness of the women, and the cost of 
keeping them. The preposterousness of 
polygamy dooms it in the event of peaceful 
competition with monogamy. The Mormon 



Church itself is modifying its whole internal 
structure, and I have heard it said that 
whereas two years ago Brigham Young 
could have emigrated to Mexico with his 
entire membership, he could "now carry with 
him only three-fourths, and in another year 
could not persuade one-fourth to go. 

Nothing can rally together from their 
centrifugal and gainful individual pursuits 
these Mormon people — who cast twenty- 
five thousand votes, and outnumber in arms- 
bearing men the American regular army — 
except the aggressive attitude of the Federal 
State toward them. Fifteen years ago Brig- 
ham Young integrated the church, and kept 
it from crumbling by feigning a persecution, 
and inventing the Utah war. This time the 
cry of persecution is not a feint. To try 
the representatives of twenty-two thousand 
votes, a jury is picked by the United States 
Marshal from one-fourth of two thousand 
Gentiles ; because less than one-fourth of 
the Gentiles living here indorse the action 
of the Court. No wife, neighbor or ac- 
quaintance of Brigham Young has made 
any complaint against him. The Court 
which is to try him packs a grand jury to 
do the work of inquisition, a petit jury to 
try him, and comes down itself amongst the 
lawyers to prosecute him. This is persecu- 
tion, because there is no law for it. The 
Court enacts the Cullom Bill, which never 
passed Congress, and prosecutes vnider it by 
the very man who wrote it. 

The present movement against Brigham 
Young at one time comprised a large por- 
tion of the Gentile and apostate population 
here, but nearly all these have fallen away, 
and the King is left nearly alone, with 



THE inORmOX TRIALS. 



21 



scarcely enough citizen material to get suf- 
ficient juries from it. The mines are ran- 
sacked to find people partial or ignorant 
enough to find verdicts according to the 
charging of the Court, and now the only 
reply the Ring makes to the allegation that 
they are without followers, is that the timid 
property-holders have fallen away from 
them. The Ring people, however, possess 
no property, unless "jumped" or prospec- 
tive, and several of them are merely waiting 
for the spoils of violence. 

Bishop Tuttle, the Episcopal functionary 
here, to whom Brigham Young gave a lib- 
eral subscription for the Episcopal Chapel, 
as he gave 1500 to the new Catholic Church, 
is said to deprecate the precipitate action of 
the Court, as does Father Welsh, the priest. 
Dr. Fuller, ex-Republican acting Governor 
here ; ex-Secretary and Governor S. A. 
Mann ; Major Hempstead, District Attor- 
ney here for eight years, and even General 
Connor, an old enemy of Brigham Young, 
expresses contempt for these sensational 
court processes. Connor has just written a 
letter to Hempstead, saying that this action 
was altogether unfortunate as a repressory 
measure. The late Chief Justice, Charles 
C. Wilson, is even more pronounced in his 
condemnation of the Court. I. C. Bateman 
and D. E. Buell, as well as the Walkers, 
the latter the leading merchants of Salt 
Lake apostates, and the former two great 
mining capitalists, are said to be of the 
same mind. Joseph Gordon, late Secretary 
to Governor Latham, calls the Court hard 
names. The large law firms are nearly all 
in like attitude. Every Representative and 
Senator west of the Rocky Mountains, in- 



cluding. Cole, Williams, Corbett, Nye, 
Stewart, Sargent, and other Republicans, 
stand opposed to any measure which shall 
sacrifice Utah to blind bigotry without 
statesmanship. Mrs. Lippincott (Grace 
Greenwood), who is here, agrees with me 
in our mutual dislike of polygamy and of 
these "hot gospelers" and "notoriety hunt- 
ers," who will not let it die ignobly, but 
must irritate it to renewed existence. 

The original movement against the Mor- 
mons, through which the Salt Lake Tribune 
was started — the first paper here to attack 
the Church — began for quite a different in- 
terest. The valuable Emma Mine was then 
in litigation, and a decision of Judge McKean 
confirmed the Walker Brothers and others 
in the occupation and use of it, as against 
the claim of James E. Lyon, of Colorado. 
The Walkers occupied the mine jointly with 
W. M. Hussey, President of the opposition 
bank of Salt Lake, the Selovers, capitalists 
of New York, and Tranor W. Park, of Ver- 
mont, late financial agent of the John C. 
Fremont ring and candidate for the United 
States Senate from California. None of 
these wished to consummate the arrest of 
Brigham Young, or provoke any collision or 
debate in Utah, but they were forced to sup- 
port McKean because his decision confirmed 
them in the mine. Meantime, Lyon and his 
attorneys, Stewart, Hempstead, Curtis J. 
Hillyer, and others, preferred charges against 
McKean, for his corrupt transaction in the 
Velocipede Mine, wishing to get him off the 
bench in the Emma Mine case. The Walkers 
and Hussey — to whom McKean was neces- 
sary — started the newspaper to sustain him, 
and McKean himself alleged that the Mor- 



22 



THE HORHON TRIALS. 



mons were behind the effort to remove him. 
Thus the Emma. Mine quarrel gave the anti- 
Mcirmon ring a temporary appearance of 
power which they no longer retain ; for by a 
compromise the mine has passed out of the 
hands of the court, and Benjamin Curtis, of 
Boston, has been made arbitrator between the 
claimants, while the anti-Lyon interest has 
relapsed to conservatism. So true is this 
that the Salt Lake Tribune has ceased to be 
the prominent ring organ, and they have 
started the Review, to keep up the appear- 
ance of a quarrel here. 

While the eftbrt was l)eing made to re- 
move McKean, the Lyon interest called upon 
Brigham Young to give it aid through his 
great, but silent, influence in Eastern circles. 

" No," replied Brigham ; " whoever will 
be sent here in his place will j^roceed to rob 
and plunder us in the same way. I have 
no choice between thieves, and can't help 
you." 

When the Emma Mine litigation, the un- 
conscious entering wedge to Mormonism, 
was pending, Tranor W. Park, who had 
lived in Nevado, and knew the desperate 
means often resorted to there to get ante- 
judicial possession of a valuable mine, be- 
came apprehensive that Lyon and his lawyers 
would import roughs from Nevada and seize 
the mine by force. He cozzened Governor 
AVoods, therefore, for the sake of the mili- 
tary which Woods controlled, with the gift 
of the presidency of a tunnel company, and 
thus, perhaps, it happens that the Governor 
is able to swear in one of his stock transac- 
tions, that he is now worth fifty thousand 
dollars — either a large oath or a large com- 
mercial increase in a short while. 



You can see from these data how much 
more than the Mormon question there is 
out here in Utah, and all the adventurers se- 
crete themselves behind the halloo of "po- 
lygamy." No wonder the Mormons are 
afraid of our judicial morals more than our 
justice. 

During the Emma Mine controversy it 
is alleged that Judge McKean was afraid to 
put Judge Hawley, his associate, upon the 
bench in the Velocipede case for fear Haw- 
ley would grant an injunction upon the Park 
interest working the Emma Mine. 

The Velocipede case has been already 
ventilated, and Senator Stewart denounced 
the Court's transactions in it publicly in the 
streets of Salt Lake. Here is the charge : 

Judge Strickland, associate and crony of 
McKean, "jumped" amine in Ophir Canon. 
Strickland sold his interest to McKean, who 
organized a company called " The Silver 
Shield," of which he was made President. 
McKean retained Baskins, the Prosecutor of 
Brigam Young, his attorney, and by visiting 
all the lawyei's practicing at McKean's Bar, 
it was extorted from them that they would 
not take the case against him. McKean then 
commenced suit, in his own court, against 
the original locators of the Velocipede Mine, 
and called Judge StriQkland to sit in his 
place. 

The defendants declined to try the case 
in the District Court before Strickland, on 
the ground that he had sold McKean his in- 
terest, and was therefore as much interested 
in the case as McKean himself They ap- 
pealed to McKean as Supreme Justice of the 
Territory, to allow Hawley, the alternate 
Justice, and who was disinterested, to try 



THE mORjnOBf TRIALS. 



23 



the issue. This McKean refused to do ; the 
case stuck fast in the courts ; and McKean's 
company, the " Silver Shield," continue to 
draw ore from the Velocipede Mine, while 
Theodore Tracy, of Wells, Fargo & Co., and 
the Velocipede people, abuse McKean and 
Stinckland without stint, and call them 
names not polite enough to put in this cor- 
respondence. 

If the interior of a Mormon family is as 
tempestuous as a Gentile's out-of-doors, the 
life must be worse than seductive. 

The three men indicted by I'icKean's and 
Baskin's grand jury (the jury picked by 
Marshal M. T. Patrick, who has little or no 
sympathy with the court he must obey), 
Young, Wells and Cannon, are the vitality of 
the Mormon Church. Young is the organ- 
izer of the industry of Utah, and the ablest 
executive spirit west of the Rocky Moun- 
tains. His power is in his will, his Yankee 
materialism, and his position, now so long 
maintained as to be traditional with his 
people. They are proud of him, of his hale 
old age, fearlessness, sagacious enterprises, 
attention to their wants, and high rank 
amongst the great men of the time. He 
has brought the mass of them out of Eng- 
lish, Danish and Swedish beggary, to a coun- 
try of land, fruit, and scenery. He can put 
ten thousand men to work any day on his 
three railways, for their daily board, paying 
them wages in stock, and he needs no land 
grant or bonded indorsement. His enter- 
prises generally pay speedy dividends. His 
tithing system brings out immigrants, who 
in time return the passage-money to the 
Church, and it I'eappears in large systems of 
mechanism and traffic. He has built five 



hundred miles of the Deseret telegraph line, 
connecting all his settlements fi'om St. 
George, where the Mormons cultivate cot- 
ton and mill it ; past Provo, where a gran- 
ite woolen mill, seven stories high, costing 
two hundred thousand dollars, and adapted 
to five hundred hands, is about to move its 
infinite spindles ; up to Brigham city, where 
his narrow-gauge road is progressing toward 
Idaho. He has built sixty miles of copera- 
tive railway in Utah, one hundi'ed and fifty 
miles of the Union Pacific Railroad, and 
many hundred miles of the Western Union 
Telegraph. There is no ecclesiastic in the 
Methodist or any other American church, 
with a tithe of his versatile and vigorous ad- 
ministrative ability. Of his sixty odd chil- 
dren, many are married to Gentiles, and all 
are endowed never with money, but with oc- 
cupation. Brigham Young is still a credulous, 
sincere convert to the Mormon Church, and 
he has never pretended, himself, to receive a 
revelation. The church has made him, as 
well as he has dignified it ; for he was only 
a painter and carpenter, with a serious na- 
ture, and an inclination for the Methodist 
Church, when the gospel of Joseph Smith 
overtook him, and drew him in. The 
prophet himself predicted a career for Brig- 
ham, and sent him abroad on a mission. 
Givciu thus a consequence and experience 
which old and beaten faiths would not have 
proffered, Brigham Young was ten years a 
traveling preacher and agent, and the doc- 
trine of polygamy was no part of his sug- 
gestion. He accepted it as he did every 
other declaration of Josej^h Smith; and the 
wife of his youth was dead before he ever 
saw the prophet. To this day, in all matters 



24 



THE mORIUOlV TRIALS. 



of mental erudition, logical analysis, and 
capacity to discover the illiteracy and mere 
cunning of Smith's writings, Brighani Young 
is grossly ignorant. As a theologian, he is 
only an exhorter and moralist. His life for 
all great ends began, not with education, but 
with a full superstitious conviction and entire 
allegiance to the Mormon Church. The 
mysteries of his fiiith he has never ventured 
to question, nor has he ever, with a learned 
man's skepticism, re-examined his creed. 
Such characters are common enough in other 
churches why not possible with this man 
wliose life in all but polygamy has been ab- 
stemious, ardent and powerful, and who, con- 
sidering his want of education, is, perhajjs, 
the greatest living instance of human de- 
velopment without advantages? 

Wells, the Mayor of Salt Lake, is a man 
of willing administration, entirely faithful to 
Young, in nothing else great, and he lias a 
disagreeable cock-eye, but he is a diligent 
Mayor, and Salt Lake city is in much his 
creation. 

Geo. Q. Cannon is one of the most intel- 
ligent Mormons, an Englishman and a good 
writer; outside of his family he is a pure 
man. 

These three are selected for indictment 
upon the complaint of nobody but a grand 
jury picked especially with this object. 

Bearing in mind these natures, strong 
men but zealous of forty years' standing (for 
Brigham was converted in 1832), you may 
imagine the situation when the indictment 
was served upon them. 

There were gathered together in the Lion 
House Brigham's chief counselors : old John 
Taylor, who stood by Joe Smith when he 



was shot in Carthage jail and was himself 
wounded, and would rather take his chances 
in the open air than go to a Gentile jail again ; 
a tall, good-looking, severe man with gray 
hair. 

There was Geoi-ge A. Smith, cousin to 
Joseph, and, next to Young, the highest man 
in the church, also a witness of the sack of 
Nauvoo, a polygamist, but with few wives— 
ft fat, aged, good-humored and rather weak 
Saint. 

There was Orson Pratt, the chief theo- 
logian and expounder, whose brother. Par- 
ley Pratt, was shot dead by the Gentiles — a 
venerable-looking. Mosaic sort of man, with 
flaming board, and large, introspective eyes, 
a Greek student, and a sort of Mormon 
Matthew Henry. The natty and flowery 
Dr. Newman, of Washington, who came out 
here with six Hebrew roots carefully com- 
mitted to memory, expecting to demolish 
Orson with them, found the old fellow to be 
capable of t:ilking Hebrew with Moses or 
Daniel. 

There was Joseph Young, President of 
the Seventies, a lean face and low forehead, 
with a mouth like Abraham Lincoln's — elder 
brother of Brigham Young. 

These and others, baked dry in the fur- 
nace of old Mormon dangers which they 
now account their glory, gave counsel to 
Brigham Young as to his duty. Almost 
unanimously they urged that he must nev^er 
give himself up : the people would rise if he 
were to be convicted, whether he, forbade 
them or no. Their counsel was to cut the 
irrigating ditches, burn every Mormon set- 
tlement in the Territory, leave the valley of 
Salt Lake in desolation, and march across 



THE MORHO^ TRIALS. 



25 



Ai-izona with their herds and portables to 
Mexican soil ; these were their own, and 
they had a right to annihilate the property 
they had created. 

Brighani Young, himself in the condition 
of an old lion, not uncertain that his prowess 
was now a part of his nature and religion, 
urged that he was promised safe conduct and 
fair treatment. 

To this old John Taylor retorted : 

" So was Joseph ! I saw the safe treat- 
ment they gave him in jail !' 

There was a genei-al exclamation of deep 
feeling and cry of perfidy at this, — and I am 
writing no fancy sketch, but the statement of 
two attorneys who were present. Biigham 
himself was deeply moved. Perhaps the 
recollection of his more youthful Captaincy 
of the Mormon exodus across the alkali 
plains inspired him with enthusiasm. To 
this urgent statement of the Gentiles that he 
could not hold out a week against the United 
States, the old man retorted with a strange, 
almost childish confidence, that if he were 
disposed to resist, the ally of Moses, of 
Gideon, and of David, would appear upon 
his side. 

Then, after a minute, Brigham closed his 
great square mouth and jaw, and said 
calmly : 

" God is in courts as well as in battles and 
marches. There will be no resistance. I 
shall obey the summons," 

In due time he dismounted from his buggy 
before the little old squalid stone stable 
whore the United States Court meets, 
climbed the creaky outside stairs, and at his 
colossal, venerable appearance, the whole 
Court unconsciously arose, bar and audience. 



He was the overshadowing presence there, 
and when he answ^ered " Not guilty," Judge 
McKean's elocution flew out of his head and 
he forgot, temporarily, to be dramatic. 

INTERVIEW WITH THE MAYOR OF 
SALT LAKE. 

Salt Lake City, October 25, 1871. 

Mr. Hiram B. Clawson, son in-law of 
Brigham Young, and Superintendent of the 
great co-operative store at Salt Lake, said to 
me last night : 

" D,- H. Wells, a member of the first 
Presidency in our church, and the Mayor of 
Salt Lake City, wishes to state to you the 
distress under which we labor about our 
titles to property here. We have inhabited 
this place twenty-two years. Almost every 
other town in the territory has obtained its 
patents under the municipal town site act. 
But we, the oldest settlement in Utah, al- 
though Congress and the General Land 
Office have behaved with prompt liberality 
toward us, are so bullied and injured by 
Maxwell, the Land Ptegister here, and the 
rest of these local adventurers, that we con- 
tinue in only possessory rights, and we are 
annoyed by the entertainment at Maxwell's 
hands of every description of impudent and 
fraudulent claim. The Associate Press 
Agent here, one Sawyer, is under the 
thumb of the ring, and we have no means to 
communicate with our fellow citizens in the 
East." 

"Do you suppose General Wells will 
talk upon other matters if I listen to him on 
this subject?" 



26 



THE IfIORl»IOX TRIAI^S. 



"Yes. Anything legitimate. He is a 
biigboar to some people who don't know 
him, but you will find him, on contact, to be 
a simple, sincere, agreeable man, like any 
respectable American." 

Soon afterward this celebrated Mormon 
warrior, the right-bower of Brigham Young, 
the Lieutenant General of the great Nauvoo 
Legion, numbering five thousand men, the 
commander of the Utah forces in the Sidney 
Johnston war, and the Fouchet of Salt Lake 
City, and terror of the criminals there, was 
ushered into my presence. 

I beheld a tall, long-nosed, sharp-browed 
man, with gray hair, a tuft of gray whiskers 
on his chin and jaws, a bluish pair of eyes, 
one of them oblique and not prepossessing, 
and a bent back, the result of age and unre- 
lieved labor. He would have been several 
inches over six feet high had he not stooped, 
but eminent service in the Mormon Church 
is of almost monastic rigor upon one so dis- 
tinguished, and this old man had a way of 
winking which suggested eyes and head 
worn out in the Secretaryship of that 
mighty energy, "Uncle Brigham," while his 
clothing was poor and worn, and he talked 
with gentleness, almost like meekness. The 
Mormons have admonished me that, al- 
though he is a natural fire-eater and a mi i- 
tary commander by instinct, he has latterly 
been a uniform counselor for peace and sub- 
mission, and has helped to sway Brigham 
Young to wise advices. 

As I never "interview" people off their 
guard, I took up a quire of paper and a pen, 
and made notes as the answers came to my 
questions. 

The old man sat across the table, and his 



voice was seldom pitched higher than if he 
had talked to himself. 

" My errand to you," began this gnarled 
old Mormon, — who was reared in St. Law- 
rence County, New York, and is an Ameri- 
can typically, — " My errand is to relate to 
you the embarrassing — the needlessly embar- 
rassing condition of our titles here. 

" I am the Mayor of Salt Lake, and, as 
this was the first town settled in the Terj-i- 
torry, I had an ambition to see it entered 
first among the town sites, according to gen- 
eral law. I made application, even before 
there was a Land Office opened at Denver, 
accoi'ding to the prescriptions of the law of 
1867, and followed it up respectfully and 
solicitously, when, in July, 1869, the Land 
Office was opened at Salt Lake. 

" It is no fault of the United States Gov- 
ernment that we are not now peacefully pos- 
sessing the titles to the ground we have 
redeemed, and which Congress wishes us to 
retain. It is the fault of the unrelenting 
Land Eegister here, Maxwell, who has enter- 
tained and abetted every petty and malicious 
claim contesting our right to the site, and 
who hinders the entry of our city apparently 
with the object of being bought off or of dis- 
couraging us, or even of robbing us of it." 

" How much do you claim as the proper 
area of Salt Lake City, General Wells'?" 

" About five thousand seven hundred 
acres, sufficient to give us water front on the 
Jordan and control of the irrigating reser- 
voirs. We had laid out the city with an 
eye to coolness, breathing valves, wide 
streets and plats for recreations. The law 
is general upon the question of municipal 
sites. It gives three hundred and twenty 



THE MORMON TRIALS. 



27 



acres to every one hundred people in a 
town; a town of five thousand people re- 
ceives* four sections of the public lands. 
Salt Lalce had grown so fiir beyond all pre- 
cedents that we had to get a special relief 
bill passed, applying to our city, and we 
took a census for the purpose. The Land 
Office at Washington recommended and 
Congress promptly passed the special bill, 
under the terms of which we added to our 
original chart other essential bits of ground. 

" What I wish to make plain to you is 
this : the nasty pretexts by which we are re- 
tarded in the matter of our entiy ! " 

" Give me the names of all the claims 
which Maxwell has entertained against the 
city." 

" Well, there are the Robinson, Slosson, 
Williamson and Orr cases. Robinson was a 
retired Surgeon of the Army, who kept a 
billiard saloon, and was a sporting man here. 
He jumped the Warm Springs property, 
our public bath-house on the outskirts of the 
town, with eighty acres of environing land, 
although we had walled up the spot, dammed 
the warm stream, fenced the inclosure, and 
used it so long under municipal regulations 
that the pump-cylinder with which we tubed 
the spring had rotted away. Robinson put 
a tent and a guard by the spring, and built a 
fence within our fence — a most impudent at- 
tempt to jump our property. We removed 
his obstructions, and he embarrassed us at 
law until his death, when his widow con- 
tinued the suit, and the land agent actually 
permitted her to make a cash entry of the 
place. Very differently did the Washington 
authorities behave. The Commissioner of 
the Land Office decided without hesitation in 



our favor, and the Secretary of the Interior 
confirmed it." 

" What was the Slosson claim 1 " 
" Slosson was a fellow who first rented a 
quarter section of ground from the city on 
the road leading to Camp Douglas^ and 
when he undertook to keep a rum-shop on 
it in violation of law, we ejected him. He 
was then abetted by this Maxwell in a bare- 
fiiced attempt to claim it and enter it; but 
Maxwell's decision was reversed by the 
heads of Department at Washington. 

" The other two claims are even more 
preposterous, yet they are received and con- 
sidered, and instead of disposing of them, 
Maxwell spends his time acting as volunteer 
counsel against us in criminal cases before 
the United States Court. Williamson 
jumped a bit of ground, claiming the pre- 
emption laws, and put a shanty upon it. It 
was a spot we had long previously reserved 
for a parade ground. J. M. Orr, a lawyer 
here, filed also Chippewa scrip for eighty 
acres between Ensign Park and Arsenal 
Hill, half-a-mile from the heart of the city. 
Now scrip can only take up land for agricul- 
tural purposes, and this claim is impudent 
beyond degree ; but this Land Register en- 
tertains it, refuses to decide it, and so keeps 
back our entry. We are nearly, or quite 
twenty thousand people ; our city is as old 
as many great towns in the Mississippi Val- 
ley ; but here men are allowed to pre-empt 
farms right in the midst of us as if they 
meant to plow us under." 

" What should I suggest, General Wells?" 
" W hy, the General Land Office ought to 
instruct this devilish Maxwell not to enter- 
tain these paltry claims, each of which is a 



28 



THE IflORmtON TRIALS. 



reproduction of claims already thrown out. 
The Government means to encourage the 
formation and building of towns, but this 
agent vetoes the law in the case of the larg- 
est town ever established on the public 
lands." 

[Here General Wells left me and went 
over to the City ITall, returning in a few 
minutes with copies of the Land Office deci- 
sions in the two cases decided, signed by 
Willis Drumniond and affirmed by the Sec- 
retary of the Interior. Tiiese decisions stale 
that "parties taking up land in the environs 
of town sites like Salt Lake City must take 
the risk of the lands falling within the town 
site," and that " where churches, school- 
houses, public buildings and places of trade 
and commerce are established in the form of 
a town, the land is already selected and held 
in reserve under the act, and cannot be in- 
fringed upon."] 

Said General Wells : " We have no com- 
plaint to make of Congress or the Land 
Office in respect of our rights under the act. 
They have treated us well." 

" As Mayor of the city. General Wells, 
do you meet with similar troubles in your mu- 
nicipal i-elations with the Federal Courts'?" 

" Yes. In the estimation of the Chief 
Justice of that Court there is but one crime 
in the world, and that is polygamy. There 
is but one set of criminals, and they are 
Mormons. He has mustered around him 
all the other vices, and adopted them as 
allies to move upon our one ofTense. Rum, 
prostitution, rapacity, incivility — these are 
the adherents of the Supreme Court of Utah 
in its holy war upon our marriage relation. 
The Court entertains every complaint made 



against us. It gives Godby an injunction 
forbidding us to sue him as a corporation, 
and a score of unlicensed liquor dealers seem 
emboldened to defy us. The liquor sellers 
have now, I am told, by the advice of the 
satellites of the Court, raised a fund to sue 
the city when we interfere with them. The 
prostitutes newly landed among us rise up 
in that Court to assail our ordinances. The 
C(jurt entertains every complaint, and those 
too preposterous to treat witli seriousness it 
puts in its pocket and staves otF, while crime 
takes advantage of the interrea;num. Our 
Aldermen's courts have been delegalized, and 
we are told by McKean that a Legislature 
has no right to bestow discretionary powers 
on a jury or a civic coi'poration. In short, 
Mr. Correspondent, there is an end in Utah 
to any equality before the law. The end of 
the law is to reach polygamy. All are hailed 
as friends of the Government, however noto- 
rious, who will leave the great and decent 
body of the Gentiles and persecute us. Our 
Probate Couits are declared to have no 
power to grant divorces, and yet Mr. Bas- 
kins, the United States Prosecuting Attor- 
ney, is married to a woman divorced by a 
Pr(jbate Court. When Mr. Hawkins was 
sentenced for adultery, it is current that at 
least one man on the bench that sentenced 
him was guilty of that crime. But, then, we 
are Mormons ! Finally, professional mur- 
derers like Bill Hickman are permitted to 
give themselves up by collusion with the 
Courts, and affect to turn State's evidence 
against us to prejudice us in the eyes of civil- 
ization." 

"Who is Bill Hickman?" 

" He is a Missouri desperado, who at- 



THE MORMON TRIALS. 



29 



tached himself to our Church many ye;>rs 
ago, and was turned out of it several years 
since. We have had him twice in custody 
for murder, and once, at least, the United 
States military authorities have taken him 
out of our hands. By occupation he is a 
cattle-stealer. He is the terror of the terri- 
tory, and children are frightened at the men- 
ace of his name. Yet his evidence is admit- 
ted to prejudice respectable men in the 
estimation of their countrymen." 

" Who arrested him ? " 

" One Gibson, one of the numerous dep- 
uty Marshals who have been sworn in from 
the lowest orders of society to overawe us. 
Gibson has been with Bill Hickman all sum- 
mer, and thei-e was probably an agreement 
between them." 

"What does Hickman look like?" 

" He is a thick-set, burly, sandy man 
with dyed beard, unable to look you in the 
eye. We took him up for killing a Mexican 
who had married his wife. He beat and de- 
serted the woman, and she was divorced 
from him. He shot the Mexican dead in his 
doorway, and galloped off. Now, I am told, 
he is having his life written and embellished 
for sale. Since his incarceration he has 
taken to wearing broadcloth." 

" Who was Yates, the man he swears he 
killed at the suggestion of yourself and 
others ? " 

" Yates was a trader of some sort whom 
Hickman brought to my camp in the Mor- 
mon war with a shackle on his heel. I 
ordered him released, and he wanted to go 
to Salt Lake, which was accorded him. He 
disappeared with Hichman and was never 
seen asain. Hichman now swears that I 



said he was a. scoundrel, and ought to be 
dead. Also that Joseph Young said he de- 
served death. What evidence to indict men 
of our age and position ! I have no recol- 
lection whatever of the circumstances. They 
transpired fourteen years ago. Drown and 
Arnold were two other men whom Hickman 
confesses to have killed, and he implicates 
us there also." 

[At this point I omit, and reserve for an- 
other time General Wells' remarks on the 
Nauvoo Legion and the military aspects of 
Utah.] 

" General Wells, had you ever seen any 
military experience before you joined the 
Church 1 " 

"No, except in the militia." 

"How did you flill in with the Mor- 
mons ? " 

"Why, 1 had lived about ten years at a 
little place called Commerce, Illinois, and 
was a young man. Justice of the Peace there, 
when (in 1839) the Mormons were driven 
out of Missouri and came across Iowa to find 
a site for a settlement. They struck Quincy 
first, and scouted iip the river to pick a 
place. Our town of Commerce was a 'paper 
city ' only ; the land was cheap, and we were 
not altogether sorry that the Mormons took 
it up. There were along about one thousand 
of them at first, and a poor, sick lot they were 
for several seasons. Joseph Smith began 
very soon to get up a memorial to the Gov- 
ernment on the subject of the plunder of his 
people in Missouri, and they came before me 
to make their affidavits. Joseph Smith in 
person took those affidavits and the memorial 
on to Washington to President Van Buren, 



so 



THE MORmON TRIALS' 



and I have often thought that the Mormon 
troubles began out of that errand of his." 

" How, sir ? " 

"You see, a good many of the k'ading 
Mormons had, while in their Gentile state, 
been Democrats, among others tlie Smiths 
and Brigham Young. Joseph Smith expect- 
ed that Van Buren woidd recognize him to 
some degree because of their predilections 
for the same party, but when he presented 
his case Van Buren made this unsatisfactory 
reply : ' Your cause is just, Init I cannot help 
you. Address your story to the magnani- 
mous State and people of Missouri.' When 
Joseph Smith returned to Nauvoo he told 
his people to vote for Harrison in 1840, 
which they did solidly, and this irritated the 
Democrats, who counted upon the Mormon 
vote. Afterwards, Joseph directed his peo- 
ple to vote for men friendly to them rather 
than for mere parties. ■ The idea got abroad, 
after awhile, that the Mormons could not be 
counted upon politically by either side, and 
it got to be a notion among the Illinois vote- 
getters that they could intimidate these poor 
people against supporting the opposite side. 
The intimidation thus begun led to the mob 
spirit, which sacrificed Joseph in 1844. 

" I was a Whig, and I thought the Mor- 
mons were sometimees as far wrong as their 
enemies, but I could not shut my eyes to the 
fact that even my party did not treat them 
like human creatures. I remember well that 
among my Whig acquaintances was a well- 
reared young man, named Moi'rison. He 
said to me one day : ' By God ! we mean to 
make them vote our ticket this year. The 
Democrats forced them to support theirs last 
year, and we can do the same thing this time.' 



•"How?' said I. 

'"Well. We'll get a requisition from 
the Governoi- of Missouri for Joe Smith and 
we'll hold that requisition over his head and 
force him to give us the votes of all his 
crowd or serve it on him.' 

" This looked like a mean trick to me, 
and I found myself, perhaps out of natural 
combativeness, standing between the Mor- 
mons and their persecutors, and finally, after 
a good deal of consideration, I joined the 
Church, several years after my acquaintance 
with the leaders." 

" What was the origin of the word, Nau- 
voo 1 " 

" They say it meant in Hebrew, ' beauti- 
ful site' or ' beautiful city.' I know nothing 
of Hebrew and can't tell whether that is true 
or not." 

" General, what became of Sidney Rig- 
don, Joseph's early coadjutor?" 

" W'ell, he is living now at Friendship, a 
town I think in Western New York, near 
Buffalo. He took it to heart that he was 
not promoted in the Church, and left us ; at 
present he is a very old, pusillanimous man, 
who sometimes addresses us communica- 
tions. He offered at one time to guarantee 
us the protection of Pi'ovidence if we would 
make up one hundred thousand dollars for 
him, and still later we hear that he has pre- 
dicted our early overthrow." 

" He has been supposed by some to have 
been Joseph's intellectual and executive su- 
perior, and to have given Mormonism its 
original impetus?" 

"Oh, no. Joseph was the man. Oliver 
Cowdrey, an educated person, was of more 
assistance to Joseph than Rigdon; for he 



THE mORlION' TRIALS. 



31 



wrote a good hand and acted as Joseph's 
Secretary, Smith himself being at first illite- 
rate, unable to write, and obliged to confine 
his correspondence to dictation. However, 
Joseph burnished up greatly in the fourteen 
years of his Presidency ; such trials as his 
would educate almost any man." 

" Is Cowdrey living 1 " 

"No. He left the Church while we 
were still at Nauvoo ; then he repented and 
followed us across the plains, and was re- 
baptized and received into fellowship. Pay- 
ing a visit or going upon a mission to Mis- 
souri, he was taken sick and died there." 

" What was the fate of Joseph's refrac- 
tory wife, Emma Smith?" 

" She, like Rigdon, was dissatisfied with 
the amount of consideration she received in 
the Church after Joseph's death, and would 
not come with us, but remained in Illinois, 
near Nauvoo, and I understand that she mar- 
ried another husband and is living there 
now." 

" Have you ever visited Nauvoo since 
the exodus in 1846?" 

"No, sir; not since the destruction of 
the temple. President Young appointed me 
Adjutant to keep the emigrant and supply 
teams well up through Iowa, and afterward 
across the Plains. I remember that when 
we had crossed the Mississippi upon impro- 
vised rafts, floats and boats, the poorest and 
most despairing body of halt, lame, sick and 
uncertain people you ever saw in the world 
— that the military mob marched up in front 
of the temple, planted a cannon and fired 
across into our camps of sick, adding panic 
to wretchedness. All that is past and for- 
gotten with us, but it is accurately set down 



in our church history, and we got converts 
all around the country, from among the wit- 
nesses of those scenes." 

" Where is Joseph's body buried ? " 

" At Nauvoo. It was buried secretly. 
He was shot in several places in the breast, 
if I remember well, and Hyrum Smith was 
shot in the face. I was not jjresent at Car- 
thage at the massacre, but around Nauvoo I 
saw many frigiitful scenes, which confirmed 
me in my already half-formed idea that these 
Mormons were a persecuted people and bet- 
ter Christians than my neighbors. The mob 
used to get in the bushes, for instance, on 
the out skirts of Nauvoo, set a man's barn 
or haystack a fire, and then by the light of 
the blaze shoot him as he ran away." 

" Are those good pictures of Joseph and 
Hyrum Smith at President Young's office 1 " 

"Yes; good likenesses. Hyrum was 
the devoted brother of Joseph, believed in 
him from the first, kept with him all the way 
down, and they died together, as I had seen 
them a many iiundred times, walking fondly 
side by side. Brigham Young, also, was a 
bosom friend of Joseph Smith, and an emi- 
nent man in the Church at that early day. 
He was President of the Quorum of the 
Twelve Apostles." 

" Can you give me an idea of Joseph 
Smith, so that I can realize him ? " 

" He was a large man, weighing two hun- 
dred pounds, and about six feet high, with a 
countenance never sanctimonious, but always 
cheerful and bright ; brown hair and light 
eyes, and 1 might call him a real jam-up 
free-and-easy good fellow. He used to play 
ball, run and wrestle with the people, and if 
a big man joined the Church, Joseph would 



32 



THE ]?IORi»IOX TRIALS. 



pick liim out and try liim for a throw, for he 
had a conceit that lie was a match for ' most 
anybody.' You can see that we keep up in 
the Church his example of liveliness in oui' 
theater and Social Hall." 

" Was it at Nauvoo that Joseph pro- 
claimed the revelation of polygamy 1 "' 

" Oh, no. He had received it a long 
Avhile before his death, and his counselors 
knew of it, but he was afraid to make it pub- 
lic." 

*' General Wells, is it true that the officers 
of the Mormon Church are elected frequently, 
and that they all owe their offices to popular 
will?" 

"Yes, sir. We have two annual confer- 
ences, one meeting on the 6th of April, the 
day our church was oiganized in the year 
1830, and the other on the Gth of October. 
Each conference continues in session from 
four days to a week, and all the people of 
the Territory come up, frequently twelve 
thousand people assembling in the big Ter- 
bernacle. Every member, man and woman, 
has a vote. I have myself been discontin- 
ued of my office, on at least, one occasion. 
Brigham Young has to be elected separately 
to each and every office he holds, first Presi- 
dent, Trustee, &c. As our people willingly 
respect their authorities, the nominations 
made by the higher quorums are generally 
confirmed, but it is anybody's province to dis- 
agree. The Methodist Cliurch is not as 
liberal as ours in ecclesiastical discipline. It 
sends its clegymen from post to pillar z<;t"%- 
nilbj, and refuses its membership a share in 
their own government. Its chief functiona- 
ries are elected once and for life, and the 
Church subsists largely upon non-communi- 



cants, seeking aid and extension promiscuous- 
ly. We live within our membership; our 
tithing system, so much decried, is consonant 
with the general inculcations of the Gospel, 
to give one-Lentil of our substance to charity 
and religion. 

"The Methodist Church teaches in its 
Discipline or manual of government, the 
Christian duty of every communicant to em- 
ploy his brother and deal with his sect, and 
it enjoins upon each Methodist not to sue 
another Methodist at law until the board of 
Stewards, Trustees, or whatever it is, have 
first tried to arbitrate in the case. 

" We accepted a debate with a preacher 
of the Methodist Church last year, and our 
people had no reason to be ashamed of the 
argument ; but since that time the Methodist, 
who were worsted, have undertaken a regular 
war at law against us. It behooves them to 
repubiicanize their Church before they assail 
our.s." 

" General Wells, I wish you would tell 
me what it was that began the Mormon war 
of 1857." 

" I can answer that in one word — Bill 
Drummond ! " 

"Who was he?" 

"One of the United States Judges. He 
came here from Illinois and spent most of 
his time at the town of Fillmore. There 
were frequent rows at his Court, resembling 
McKean's wranglings with us at present, but 
we did not know that he was backed up by 
the Government, and we set his attitude 
down to general personal ' cussedness.' He 
wanted to be transferred to another Court, it 
seems, nearer the Pacific coast, and thought 
before leaving us that he would fire a fuirt- 



THE MORMOX TRIALS. 



33 



ing shot. So after he slipped away, there 
appeared at Washingtoa a report, signed 
by him, charging us with every sort of crime, 
and this was immediately followed by a gen- 
eral yell from tiie new^spaper press. 

" As we had only a monthly mail, we 
were for a long time perfectly unaware of 
this rising storm. But one of our friends in 
Washington cut from the newsj)apers nearly 
a hundred denunciatory extracts of us and 
sent them out to us. 

"They arrived here one Sunday in the 
month of May, 1857, and 1 remember that, 
instead of religious exercises, we had those 
slips read at the tabernacle all day. 

"The next we knew, a mail contract 
that we had purchased and had fully stocked 
with teams, stations, horses, and every ap- 
purtenance, at a cost of 1300,000, and which 
was subsidized with only $20,000 a year, 
was taken from us at Washington and given 
to other parties for 1100,000. That was a 
great blow to us. Had we been in com- 
munication with the eastern people more fre- 
quently and surely, they would never have 
made that war upon us. 

" The next we knew, old General Harney 
had been placed in command of a great army 
to move against us. 

" We hated Harney, because he had re- 
cently massacred a lot of Indian women, and 
was called among us ' the Sqnaw Killer.' 
Afterward, you know, he was removed, and 
Sidney Johnston substituted for him. We 
were determined Harney should not practice 
his bloody instincts upon us. I was appoint- 
ed commander of our forces, and moved out 
by Weber and Echo Canons, and sent my 
scouting parties far ahead. \ye relied upon 
5 



the alliance of winter as a military friend, 
and everybody was united for resistance. 

" Van Vliet, Quartermaster, came out to 
Salt Lake to see what • he could get, in an- 
ticipation of the arrival of the army, in the 
way of supplies and quarters. We told 
him he should not have a shingle for shelter, 
a pound of bread, nor a bundle of fodder. 
He saw that he could make nothing out of 
us and departed. 1 had him followed almost 
to the Missouri River by day and night, 
and when he made his report I had men in 
his camp watching him there." 

" For what distance and time did you 
harass that army, General Wells ? " 

" We were on their flank and in their 
rear almost all the time from their quitting 
the Missouri River till they got to Bridger. 
My orders were to hinder them in every 
way short of shedding blood, but I was not 
to kill anybody. And I never did. One of 
my skirmishing parties was captured, and 
upon the men were found copies of my or- 
ders, which were afterward printed in Wash- 
ington city. Those instructions show con- 
clusively that if I had killed anybody I would 
have disobeyed commands, and yet I am now- 
indicted for the murder of a man named Yates, 
committed, as alleged, at that time, and upon 
the oath of a desperado who confesses to the 
murder of about twenty men committed by 
his own hand. 

" On the contrary, my operations were 
confined to embarrassing the road, making 
panic and turning back teams. I thought 
that if I could retard the march, a more charit- 
able and better informed public opinion 
would rise up in the East. I had a company 
of men in the rear of their teams which 



34 



THE MORMON TRIALS. 



would arrest a certain number of teamsters 
every day, and after leaving them sufficient 
stores to regain their base of supplies, they 
were turned to the right about. But we 
found that they would merely go back until 
we ceased to watch them, and then return. 
So it became necessary to burn their teams 
and incapacitate them for a campaign. This 
was done north of Fort Bridger, on the Big 
and Little Sandy Rivers. 

" Every night those troops encamped 1 
had men among them. Their conduct showed 
significantly what they meant to do to us. 
Thoy had doggerel songs, copies of which 
were captured, announcing their intention to 
make a barrack of Brigham Young's house, 
and enjoy his family. These songs inflamed 
our people, and united us as one man in the 
defense of our settlements. 

"But just about this time the United 
States had some troubles nearer home, in 
Kansas, or somewhere. The fact is, Provi- 
dence was in it. It was an interposition of 
Almighty God. The leinforcements from 
the East came up slowly, or were halted on 
the way, and the Administration at Wash- 
ington, having reaped no glory and being 
subjected to considerable criticism, thought 
it prudent to compromise. They sent Sen- 
ator Powell, of Kentucky, and Ben. McCul- 
loch to us, in 1858, as Peace Commissioners, 
and we were offered a free pardon for all we 
had done if we would let the troops go 
through the form of passing through or by 
Salt L ike, not stopping or quartering here, 
but encamping out or beyond the city. 

" We had done nothing except try to 
protect our property and the honor of our 
families, and now we were to accept a pardon. 



" Some time after that Senator Broder- 
ick, of California, was here, and he told us 
the Government could have raised one mil- 
lion volunteer troops at that time, to wipe 
us out utterly. Such was to be our doom 
for protecting ourselves. 

" To avoid bloodshed we consented to let 
a camp be formed within our territory, and 
the army marched by, encamping beyond 
the Jordan, then in Brigham's Canon, and 
finally at Camp Floyd. There they re- 
mained until 1861, when they destroyed 
stores, munitions and quarters and went off' 
to take part in the war of the rebellion. 

" Had these troops annoyed us we were 
prepared to cut every ditch, and fire every 
town and shelter in the Territory. Tinder 
had been placed in the houses and men sys- 
tematically delegated to set it off"." 

"Where would you have gone, General 
Wells?" 

"I don't know just where. We had pro- 
vided for that, however." 

"General Wells, have you any idea what 
inclination General Grant has in the matter 
of these prosecutions for polygamy 1 " 

" Our advisers at Washington say that 
Grant has avowed his intention to execute eith- 
er the Cragin or CuUon bills, if Congress will 
pass them, and if neither be passed, then he 
will execute the law of 1862." 

" What reasons are there for his taking up 
polygamy at this critical time in the period 
of mining and railway development here?" 

" Well, sir, our offense is like that of the 
Caffirs against the Dutch. The Caffirs said : 
' Our greatest crime is that we have received 
a beautiful country from the Almighty, and 
you want it.' " 



THE MORMOX TRIAI.S. 



35 



SALT LAKE AI^D UTAH PICTURES. 



Salt Lake, October 27. 

Here is the Territory of Utah, occupy- 
ing to the Pacific coast very nearly the same 
situation that Ohio bears to the Atlantic 
States, suspended between a great lake and 
a great river, the Colorado, but many thou- 
sand feet above the sea. It is a solitary con- 
quest from the desert, accomplished by the 
necessities of religious fanaticism ; and it is 
nothing else, except certain mines and rail- 
ways which availed themselves of the com 
fortable institutions of this settlement. 
The time seems to have come when the 
system of government which has prevailed 
here must meet with the two forces of 
resident democracy and a distant public 
opinion, the former antagonizing itself slowly 
and moving against Marmonism by attrition 
and with due regard to the preservation of 
property ; the latter violent and uni'easoning, 
and led on by emissaries even more violent 
and far less scrupulous. 

This is the issue : Shall Mormonism fall 
by an attack of natural and social forces, to 
which its inherent weakness will make it an 
easy victim, or must it be the subject of a 
crusade, which will merely force it to shift 
its geography and retain the worst of its 
practices. In the one case we preserve Utah 
and its labor ; in the other ordain a new 
lease of life to polygamy and extinguish a 
community in much admirable, and a settle- 
ment not to be restored. 

So much attention has been paid to Salt 



Lake City by tourists and journalists that 
the Eastern public possess little or no idea 
of the other thriving towns and cities of 
Utah. From Brigham City to St. George, 
a distance of about three hundred and fifty 
miles, there is a chain of settlements reaching 
through Central Utah north and south, almost 
entirely. Mormon, and almost every large 
town contains a tabernacle and a tithing- 
house, and several a residence with family 
attached, for President Young. There are 
twenty counties in Utah, and all are connect- 
ed by a road and telegi'aph system. The 
richest counties lie between Salt Lake City 
and the northern boundary, but the belt of 
the settlement follows the general line of the 
western slope of the Wahsatch Mountains 
and stops at St. George, on the river Virgin, 
while there are two good lateral valleys, one 
toward the head-waters of the Virgin, whose 
further settlement to the east is KanabFort, 
and another in the San Pete Valley, ^vhere 
there are several rich settlements presided 
over by Orson Hyde. The San Pete Valley 
makes good wheat, and in it are the towns 
of Manti, Moram, Springfield, Mt. Pleasant 
and Ephraim, ranging from fifteen hundred 
to twenty-five hundred people each. 

Southward from Salt Lake, the great 
road to Arizona runs parallel with the 
Jordan River, the outlet of Utah Lake into 
Salt Lake, leaving to the east the great 
Cottonwood mining district, and leading to 
Provo, which is, next to Salt Lake and 
Ogden, the most important place in the 
Territory. Provo stands upon the Timpon- 
ayos River, near Utah Lake, a clear, deep, 
fresh-water sheet, full of heavy trout, and it 



36 



THE MORMON TRIALS. 



contains the best water power in the Terri- 
tory. Here is Brigham's seven-story granite 
woolen mill. President Smart, ex-Mayor of 
Salt Lake, is the town authority. Passing 
Nephi and several other thrifty places, the 
road reaches Fillmore, ninety-six miles from 
Salt Lake, the real capital of the Territory 
by designation, and still showing the disused 
stone wing of an intended capital edifice. 
Below Fillmore, upon a " divide," is a 
telegraph operator, quartered in a stone fort 
to j^rotect him from Indians, who are some- 
times bad here. At Beaver, a town of two 
thousand one hnndred people, forty miles 
south of Fillmore, one of the three United 
States District Courts is held. The next 
important place is Parowau, founded by 
Geo. A. Smith, in 1852, and then Cedar 
City, in a coal and iron region, with a de- 
serted forge. Just south of this place we 
cross the rim of the great Salt Lake basin, 
and almost immediately the country turns 
red in color, and wears that wizard look as 
if scorched by fire. The first town beyond 
is Toquerville, founded in 1859; then the 
town of Washington, with six hundred in- 
habitants and Brigham's celebrated cotton 
mill. Finally, in the southwest corner of 
the Territory stands St. George, on the Rio 
Virgin, a tow^n of tropical looking groves 
and neat cottages of wood, adobe and stone 
upon a plain between mountain " benches," 
the plain itself exuding glauber salts in 
places for acre upon acre, which must be 
covered with thousands of cartloads of sand, 
and drenched out by patient processes. 
This is, in many respects, the most remark- 
able and also most promising place in Utah ; 
it is to Mormondom what Los Angeles in 



Califoi-iiia is to the North American; a 
grapery, cotton field, and invalid resort. 
Even here Brigham has a cot and family on 
the brink of Arizona. He has personally 
visited every part of this region, and at the 
age of sixty-nine he took Savage, the chief 
photographer here, upon a tour with him 
up the wild volcanic vale of the Virgin, and 
made him take views of the '• Little Zion 
Valley," the Mormon Yosemite, where they 
expect to establish summer and winter re- 
sorts when the railway is finished. 

Utah is equal to the New England States 
in area, but only one hundred and fifty 
thousand acres are under irrigation, and the 
capacity of the utmost irrigating system is 
limited to three hundred thousand acres 
more. Without running streams there can 
be no agriculture nor even reliable pastures 
here ; the timber is sparse, small and difficult 
of access ; the Indians were never able to 
get anything from the Territory, and the 
soil, although apparently rich, would relapse 
to dry gravel and clay in a month but for 
these needy and ever vigilant husbandmen. 
Utah, as it stands, is just capable of feeding 
the miners, merchants, troops and railroad 
gangs which have availed themselves of the 
Mormom occupation, and in this view 
Mormonism has been as lucky an episode in 
the course of empire as the discovery of 
gf)ld in California or the inception of the 
Texan Republic. The tithing system, the 
absolute superintendence of the materialistic 
Brigham Young, and the semi-ecclesiastical 
discipline prevailing here, were as much ihe 
impositions of nature as of ambition ; they 
are growing weaker now because the work 
is nearly perftu'med. Hundreds of miles 



THE MORMOX TRIALS. 



37 



of canals and dikes, a people distributed 
over all the reclaimable region of the Terri- 
tory, co-operation reduced from a religious 
duty to a voluntary and profitable system 
and upon a relative scale larger than else- 
where in the world, — these, no matter how 
they came about, are triumjihs not to be 
gainsayed by the political economist and 
statesman, however the zealot and the prowl- 
ing territorial politioiau may belittle them. 

Utah, agriculturally, as nobody else liut 
the Mormons could have developed it, is a 
necessity to the mining, railroad, and mili- 
tary operations of the central continent ; for 
these enterprises subsist upon the produce 
of these farms, and a large human settlement 
here is also a strategic experiment. The 
neighboring mines of Idaho, Nevada, Mon- 
tana and Colorado draw much of their store 
supplies from the valley, 

"It isn't like Nevada," said a miner to 
me, yesterday ; " here you can just walk 
down the mountain, from the mine to the 
foot, and find eggs, butter, and milk in the 
Mormon settlement." 

The army and the railroads, moved from 
this point strategically, must also subsist 
upon Mormon agriculture. The time may 
come when the mines of the neighboring 
territories must be abandoned by reason of 
the cost of labor and living around them, 
but here agriculture and population had 
preceded mines and railways nearly a quarter 
of a century, and even under the present 
mining excitement mining labor costs only 
two dollars and a half a day, while in 
Nevada, barren of farms, it costs four 
dollars. It is largely Mormon labor which 
is completing the whole central railway 



system, striking out as boldly at present 
down the affluents of the Columbia and 
Colorado Rivers as it did upon the heavy 
work in Echo and Weber Canons for the 
Union Pacific Railway. 

It is the opinion of many of the ablest 
men in the country that Utah will be the 
main manufacturing country for the Pacific 
Coast, like the Pittsburg region of the East. 
Already the manufactures here embrace 
cotton and woolen mills, iron, leather, flour, 
gloves, and small wares. The system of 
farming by irrigation is readily adaptable to 
water power uses. Coal is found just east of 
Salt Lake, which is used along eight hun- 
dred miles of the Pacific Railway, and other 
facts indicate Salt Lake as the emporium of 
all the business between the Rocky Moun- 
tains and the Sierra Nevada. 

But M'hat elements of population will 
take this soil and conduct agriculture here if 
the Mormons should abandon it"? Gentiles 
tell me that between the drought, grass- 
hoppers, alkali, the need of perpetual co- 
operation to regulate the ditches, and the 
primitive poverty of the ground. Mormon 
frugality and unity only can sustain the 
miracle of this garden in the desert. There 
are not five Gentile farmers in Utah. An 
exodus to Mexico, with their abundance of 
fine heads of cattle, sheep and horses, might 
give Mormonism a better empire, but what 
race would revive this one? 

The probability of emigration is a wide- 
sj)read theme already, in view of the harsh 
attitude of the Courts here. Mormonism 
has been a scries of emigrations, from Kirt- 
land to Missouri, eight hundred miles; 
thence to Nauvoo, four hundred miles; 



38 



THE HORHON TRIAI^S. 



thence to Salt Lake, fifteen hundred miles ; 
and each exodus has been an epoch and an 
advantage to the church. From St. George 
it is but four bundled miles across Arizona 
by a well defined and serviceable road to the 
Republic of Mexico, and there are settle- 
ments and military posts as far as Tucson 
and Tabac on the brink of Mexico. Tlie 
Mexicans will welcome anywhere between 
Chihuahua and Sinaloa, these quiet settlers 
who can create a power on the Gulf of 
California, and curb the Apaches by either 
the Quaker or the Crook method, 

I have already informed you that the 
proposition to emigrate was debated on the 
first of October, in the business office of 
Brigham Young, and that there were present, 
besides the three members of the First 
Presidency, the majority of the Twelve 
Apostles and many of the Seventies and 
Bishops, in all upwards of thirty persons, 
the sinew of the Church. Had the propo- 
sition been carried out, Utah would have 
been systematically desolated and rendered 
incapable of supporting ten thousand people, 
and private vengeance would have been an 
episode of so vast and bitter an act of 
sacrifice and despair. 

The remarkable man who presides over 
these people added to the many conquests 
of his life, the final victory over his absolute 
spirit when he put by the counsels of his eld- 
ers and went into court upon an indictment 
which, in its language and tone, is at va- 
riance with whatever is known of his life by 
any third party, Brigham Young is just as 
guilty of " lewd and licentious conduct and 
cohabitation " as the Viceroy of Egypt, the 
Chief of the Cherokees, the Emperor of Ja- 



pan, or the patriarch Moses, with their sever- 
al wives. His children and wives are all ac- 
knowdcdged and provided for ; of the latter 
he has sixteen, and of children sixty odd. 
His offense is polygamous marriages, prac- 
tised for twenty years with the full knowl- 
edge of an unbroken series of United 
States officials, Judges and Presidents in- 
cluded, by all of whom he has been treated 
with equality, and by many with distinction. 
The statute under which he is indicted was 
passed by Mormons in their Territorial Leg- 
islature, and made punishable by from three 
to ten years' imprisonment, at the time of 
the formation of their code, and it was 
meant to apply to common fornication. 
There is but one statute in the same terms 
in any State code, — that of Massachusetts, 
passed in 1790; and this, as construed, pro- 
vides that the lewdness and laseiviousness 
must be public, and that secret cohabitation 
is not intended ; in other words, the offense 
is against decency and not chastity. There 
has been no complaint of this nature ever 
made in the present instance, but the Judge 
and the Prosecuting Attorney, the avanl 
c/iiard of that supposititious distant sentiment, 
packed a grand jury — there is no other word 
applicable — to indict Young, and will pack 
a petit jury to convict him. In my opinion, 
and in the apprehension of every business 
man and military officer in Utah, if this is 
done, and Brigham Young be sent to jail, 
the Church authorities, including himself, 
will not be able to prevent an outbreak or 
an exodus. If he should die in the hands of 
the authorities, being old and of j^roud spirit, 
the Church will have a greater martyr than 
Joseph Smith to win disciples upon, and in 



THE MORMOX TRIALS. 



39 



any event, the roaming Seventies will have 
a new ilhistration and provocation for zeal. 

If President Young were indicted upon 
a charge of bigamy or polygamy, instead of 
lasciviousiiess and lewdness, he would do 
well to stand up in Court and plead guilty. 
His indictment on the head alleged is pre- 
posterous and merely tantalizing. As to 
the later indictment for murder, on the affi- 
davit of Bill Hickman before the grand jury, 
that is a graver matter and deserves a para- 
graph of consideration 

The necessities of Mormuuism have al- 
ways demanded a mingling of military with 
civil stringency. Driven away from civili- 
zation, amongst Indians and " Greasers," they 
were required to maintain troops, and they 
even indulged the hope that the land they oc- 
cupied might be purchased or conquered by 
them from Mexico. Among their motley 
converts were many rough characters from 
Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa, and as they re- 
treated from civilization with the method and 
order of Xenophon, they put to temporary use 
and importance some of these physical bra- 
vos who are now swearing off their own old 
personal atrocities against the heads of the 
Mormon Church, who have " cut them off." 

The vilest of these fellows is Bill Hick- 
man, a Judas and a Joab in one. He was 
under indictment for murder, when the Unit- 
ed States Government befriended him, and 
accepted his irresponsible statement that 
Brigham Young's son, Joseph — an able, but 
not always temperate or judicious young 
man — had said that one Yates ought to be 
put out of the way. This is hearsay evi- 
dence, and it is all that the Court possesses. 
Hickman is a Missouri border ruffian, a po- 



lygamist, and a human hyena. General 
Morrow told me at Camp Douglas that Bill 
Hickman was unworthy of credit or com- 
panionship. Hickman admits having mur- 
dered Yates, with his own hand, in 1857. 

Another crime charged to Brigham 
Young is the " Mountain Meadow Massa- 
cre," s(j called — an act of retaliation and ra- 
pacity, committed sixteen years ago, in 
Southwestern Utah, by one John D. Lee, 
since " cut off" from the church. Lee led a 
band of Indians and Mormons into the camp 
of these emigrants, and slew them for their 
stock, and for revenge. It was a bad deed, 
but if it is to be recalled and adjusted in the 
Courts, it should not be Bill Hickman, but 
some of the parties or witnesses to the crime, 
vvho should be brought forward to give testi- 
mony concerning it. 

Human life in Utah is safer than proba- 
bly anywhere in civilization. The motives 
and causes of murder exist in a less degree — 
as avarice, liquor, gambling, quarrelsomeness 
and prostitution. The industrious political 
vagabonds who write letters from Utah to 
the East have created the band of " Dan- 
ites" and other hobgoblins out of air and 
foolscap. 

I talked to Porter Rockwell, the alleged 
leader of the " Danites," a fat, curly-haired, 
good-natured chap, fond of a drink, a talk, 
and a wild venture. The United States au- 
thorities have several times used him to 
make arrests of lawless characters. 

Among the Mormons are bad people ; 
polygamy and ignorance are no guarantee 
against the corruptions of original sin ; but 
Mormonism is a religion, essentially the two 
testaments of Judaism and Christianity, with 



40 



THE mORinoIV TRIALS. 



Joseph Smith's gibberish appended, and the 
sincere believers in it find no warrant for 
murder anywhere in their creed. 

The h)yalty of the Mormons toward the 
United States is also mailc the snbject of 
accusation. I am writing these letters for 
people whom I respect, and not for small 
fry, and the former class know very well 
tliat Mormonism has never had great reason 
to admire the United States. We arc deal- 
ing now with a phenomenon, a superstition, 
and have got to look at it to know how to 
apprehend it and govern it. Begotten 
among us, in the Empire State, near the 
head of the Ohio Valley, this church is a 
native dispensation, a gospel prepared for 
the new world, attempting to recite tlie 
story of our origin and that of the Indians, 
our predecessors. In my belief, it was less 
the offspring of imposture than of disease. 
Such as it is, it relies upon the common 
basis of Christian orthodoxy — faith ! You 
must embrace it not only by reason, but by 
the abnegation of reason. You must begin 
at the end and embrace it in the old-fashioned 
Whitfieldian way of paroxysm. It is almost 
solely an Anglo-Saxon church. What is 
absurdest in it is nearest the theology of the 
religions our fathers believed in. Moses 
took the Gospel on stone ; Joe Smith on 
gold. Both told the rise, exodus and power, 
and prophesied the discomfiture of a nation. 
I do not, personally, believe one figment of 
Mormonism as a story. I do, without cavil 
or question, believe the whole story of Moses 
and Christ; because I know nothing else; 
that was my hearthstone faith ; I inherit it 
and its civilization. Among the mature 
fruits of that civilization are forbearance, 



the belief that error is mortal, and a rea- 
sonable education. The human mind and 
our race have risen to mighty fermentations 
and heroisms, upon propositions as absurd 
and astonishing as Joseph Smith's, Here is 
the greatest Territory of the Union erected 
upon a delusion. Let the creation itself 
smother the delusion. Give society a chance 
and it will drive polygamy back into the 
vices. Society, under its political organiza- 
tion, has been able by mild emulation to 
reduce ecclesiasticism to docility. Method- 
ism at one period adopted a disciplinary sys- 
tem of brotherhood, under which a man like 
Judge McKean might have ruled every Meth- 
odist oflf a jury in cases aflfecting his fellow- 
Methodist. Quakerism was a revolt and a 
rebuke against the civil establishments of its 
time. English Puritanism, as it ruled in 
New England, coalesced the congregation 
and the town, the spiritual and the civil 
arm. These theologies survive, shorn of 
their physical and intolerant pretensions. 
They have their trophies and their better 
results. In the same way, Mormonism was 
an ignorant attempt to make a State out of 
a churchy a magistracy out of a priesthood. 
It has learned that it cannot escape from 
society. The temporal power of the church 
is already reduced. Shall we go back into 
the dark and desert age of Mormonism to 
try and punish it for its excrescences? Shall 
we bring up the Society which hanged the 
witches, the Quaker who interrupted a church 
meeting, and the Mormon who tried to create 
an army to protect his church, and deal with 
them like reasonable criminals ? Six months 
ago, before Judge McKean arrived here, like 
a Catholic Jesuit dropping down in the vale 



THE MORMON TRIALS. 



41 



of the wilderness, the Mormons were thor- 
oughly reconciled to the United States cand 
anxious for its benefits. Their past persecu- 
tions were forgotten. It is we, or our in- 
quisitorial Courts, who have recalled to- 
gether our aofSressions and the Mormons' 
excesses. 

Let us be cool-headed, and not jump be- 
hind our century ! Polygamy is the least 
mortal of institutions. It was an after- 
thought of Mormonism. Democracy will 
wrestle with it presently and crush the life 
out of it. We need not sentimentalize over 
it, like that short-haired show-woman. Miss 
Anna Dickinson, who is in no danger. Po- 
lygamy is merry enough to read about in 
the Arabian Nights and in Byron's or Mor- 
ris's poems. We construe it into a terror 
and move upon it with serious faces, because 
our own neighbors and kinsmen are fooling 
with the folly. 

Co-operation, advocated by the press and 
reformers as a benefit everywhere else, had 
no sooner been adopted among the Mormons 
than there went up a howl of " monopoly," 
" commercial restriction !" 

To get at the bottom of this matter, I 
went right to William Jennings, the richest 
Mormon, Brigham excepted, and who was 
alleged to have been compelled by Brigham 
to give his store to the enterprise. Mr. 
Jennings inhabits a large and beautiful 
house, which probably cost two hundred 
thousand dollars, and he dispenses cheer of 
a hearty and vinous qualit3^ He has but 
one wife living, and his daughters expressed 
themselves indignantly that their deceased 
mother was to be declared impure and them- 
6 



selves illegitimate by a Court of Judges be- 
longing to another religion. 

Mr. Jennings said that he lived in Mis- 
souri, at St. Joseph, and was not a member 
of the church, nor cognizant of its existence, 
when he left England. The plan of the co- 
operation store was Brigham Young's, and he 
proposed it as early as 1853, but Jennings, 
Lawrence, Walker Breathers and Godby, to 
whom it Avas suggested, did not think favora- 
bly of it. These merchants made large sums 
of money — sums out of proportion to the 
producer and consumer — in consideration of 
brotherly equity. Wheat was bought from 
the Mormon farmers at seventy-five cents a 
bushel, often paid for in merchandise, and 
then sold in the form of flour in the mining 
regions for twenty-five dollars gold per hun- 
dred weight, a profit of several hundred per 
cent. 

"Thus," said Mr. Jennings, " we all pros- 
pered inordinately, and I had meditated re- 
tiring from business in 1867, when again 
President Young revived his plan of a co- 
operation store. Those of us who intended 
to remain steadfast to the Church found it 
now imperative to agree, because a certain 
squatter here, named McGroarty, had man- 
aged to get about one-twentieth of the vote 
of the people in Utah, and he had been sent 
up to Congress by Walker Brothers, and 
others, with money made out of our people, 
to contest the seat of our delegate, W. H. 
Hooper. It was apparent that these for- 
tunes made among us were to be played 
against the dignity and will of the people. 
I at once rented my store for five years to 
the co-operation society, and took $75,000 
worth of stock, a larger amount than any- 



42 



THE HORMOX TRIALS. 



body else, although President Young is now 
nearly equal with me in the concern. We 
niade the thing democratic, so that five dol- 
lars would constitute a stockholder, and we 
tightened it only with regard to the trans- 
ferral of shares ; for if this Court up here 
could by any means entrap us into its pre- 
cincts, we should have injunctions, receivers 
and mandamuses without stint. The capital 
is not far from half a million, and we pay 
ten per cent, a month, so that our customers 
who are stockholders get their proportion in 
dividends. We have brought down prices 
to our poor people who are not stockholders, 
and Mr. Clawson, the manager, seeks to regu- 
late profits down to ten per cent, upon articles 
of prime necessity. 

" While the co-operative store has been a 
gratifying and beneficent success, other mer- 
chants are doing a large, independent busi- 
ness. Mormons are free to buy anywhere, 
and their only incentive to go to the ' co-op ' 
is interest. We have only one branch which 
we directly control, at Ogden, but our plan 
is imitated in every ward of Salt Lake, and 
in every settlement of Utah." 

Speaking of Godby, Mr. Jennings said 
that he was flighty and ambitious, and that 
he had done a mean thing in taking a fifth 
wife after apostatizing. " No man has a 
right to be a polygamist," said Mr. Jen- 
nings, " nnless he believes in it as a revela- 
tion." 

Not only is monogamy the practice of 
the entire " Josephite " or Young Smith 
school of the Mormon Church, but even at 
Salt Lake it has exemplars, such as Ferma- 
morz Little and William Jennings, who are 
considered the richest men in the Territory 



next to Brigham Young. Jennings at one 
time had two wives, but since the death of 
the first he has never re-married. These 
men are probably worth one million dollars 
apiece, and worth half as much is W. H. 
Hooper, Mormon banker and Delegate in 
Congress, also a monogamist in practice and 
prejudice. Bolivar Roberts, who is very 
rich in real estate, and who is reputed to 
liave received three hundred thousand dol- 
lars for his interest in the Sweetwater Mine, 
is likewise the Mormon husband of one wife. 
John T. Caine, editor of the Salt Lake Herald, 
the leading newspaper between Denver and 
Sacramento ; D. E. Calder, Superintendent 
of the Utah Central Railroad; H. T. Fantz, 
and many others, find the cares of one family 
sufficient. 

Polygamy, however, is warmly defended, 
even by Mormon monogamists, as right, if 
not convenient. John Young, the son of 
Brigham, has three wives, and Joseph 
Young, jr., two, while two pairs of Brig- 
ham's daughters are married respectively to 
H. B. Clawson and . 

Brigham Young's most noted wife is 
called Amelia; she is a vivacious, spirited 
woman, about thirty-two years old, Ameri- 
can born, and without children. Another of 
the President's wives is Mrs. Decker, who 
retains indications of much former beauty, 
and her daughters ai-e the handsomest of 
Brigham's children. The old gentleman 
looks out well for avocations for his sons- 
in-law, and it is said that in his will he has 
divided all his property into seven hundred 
shares, given the bulk of it to the church, 
and distributed the rest equally among his 
fixmilies. 



THE MORIWEOX TRIALS. 



43 



I saw Brigham at the Social Hall, on the 
occasion of my last visit here, bid four of 
his wives adieu. The old gentleman had 
been dancing, but had fetigued the legs of 
seventy years, and he approached the clus- 
ter of his helpmates, buttoned up in a blue 
overcoat with a white vest underneath, a red 
woolen comforter around his neck, and a 
worn silk hat in his hand. He looked very 
lai-ge, square, and bland, and he said with 
tenderness and dignity, shaking each by the 
hand : 

" My dear, I bid you good night ! " 

The wives crowding up, with apparent 
emulation, asked if it was his wish that they 
also should accompany him home. 

"No," said Brigham, "stay as long as 
you please. I will have the carriage come 
back and wait for you at the door below. 
Good night ! " 

They were all middle-aged women, com- 
mon-place but cheerful; Brigham is said to 
object to his wives dancing round dances. 
It is wonderful that a Mormon with half a 
dozen wives can be jealous or fastidious 
about each of them, and yet I have heard 
people here fly into a passion because their 
wives were spoken to on the street by strang- 
ers, or stared at. The only case of assassi- 
nation chargeable with any degree of proba- 
bility to the Mormons, was that of Brassfield, 
a teamster, shot dead in the streets of Salt 
Lake for selling a Mormon's furniture and 
proposing to elope upon the proceeds of it 
with a wife. 



Godby, who hates Brigham Young sin- 
cerely, has four wives, besides one divorced. 
Since he has been " cut oft*" from the church 
he has contemplated setting the example of 
radical monogamy. "And yet," says Godby, 
" I love all my wives so equally, and they 
all love me so harmoniously, that I cannot 
pick out the one to stay nor those who must 
go." 

This same Godby, in a speech upon the 
inviolability of plural marriages, which he 
made some time ago, gave in the language 
of the resolution a remarkable concession 
made by the Board of Orthodox Missiona- 
ries in India. It was a question as to what 
those Hindoos who had been married to 
several wives before their conversion, should 
do about them after baptism, repentance, &c., 
and admission into the Christian Church. 

Looking at the distresses and awkward- 
nesses of the situation on all sides, the mis- 
sionaries agreed that polygamous converts 
might retain those wives which they already 
possessed, and go on as before. 

With this precedent — the only one con- 
sistent with humane principles — we may ask 
how much harder our Methodist brethren 
are going to be upon these many children of 
many wives born into the world under the 
sacred presumption of an inviolable mar- 
riage 1 Reverse the situation ! Be the 
Mormon, and with your families before 
you, designate those to be sacrificed, bast- 
ardized and disowned ! 



44 



THE IWORHOW TRIALS. 



mSIDE VIEWS OF UTAH SOCIETY. 

Salt Lake, Oct. 27. 

Mr. Kinzer, a Californian, who has been 
developing mines in Soutliorn Utali, told me 
several anecdotes which illustrate Mormon 
dignity and sincerity. One day, as the pe- 
riod of the semi-annual Mormon conference 
approached, he met a very old woman driv- 
ing a cart to which an ox was attached. The 
miner peeped into her cart and saw that it 
contained nothing to eat except a little salt 
meat and a bag of meal, with fodder for the 
ox. This was somewhere in Juab County. 

"Old lady," said the miner, "where are 
you going 1 " 

" Up to our conference, sir. I ha'n't 
been there now for two year, but I want 
to get my soul warmed up a little. It 
appeared as if I could not stay away any 
longer. I have been in church twenty-two 
years, and I always go to the conference 
when I can, but I live 'way down here on 
the Santa Clara River, and it takes me three 
weeks to go to Salt Lake." 

This poor old zealot had actually been 
more than two weeks on the way to her 
church conference; she camped out every 
night, and was entirely alone and unbe- 
friended. The miners gave her some cheese 
and bread and sent her on her way rejoicing. 

The Mormon conferences are fearfully 
apostolical. Twelve thousand people often 
attend them. A band of music plays at the 
Tabernacle gate as the Saints go in and as 
they come out, and " Shoo Fly," " Bully for 
You," " High Ricketty Barlow," &c., are the 
class of tunes selected. Go into that vast 



enclosure, and you will see the Mormon 
Church conducting its business, the hands of 
its officials held up by the whole broad pub- 
lic sentiment. W. H. Hooper told me that 
for nearly twenty years he had attended 
these conferences, and he had nevei- heard a 
half dozen nays voted against any measure 
propounded by the High Quorum. Brig- 
ham Young reads such an announcement as 
this : 

" Brother William Johnson is nominated 
for a mission to Russia of two years, at his 
own expense. All in favor of that nomina- 
tion will say aye." 

A roar goes up from the great conference 
of Saints, and Brother William Johnson, who 
perhaps keeps a shop in one of the streets of 
Salt Lake, who does not speak any language 
but his own, and that indifferently well, and 
who has never traveled away from home 
ten miles in his life, has no option but to 
hearken to that cry as if it were as sacred 
as the voice in St. Paul's dream of "Come 
over into Macedonia and help us." 

A great many people who read this will 
cry out, " Despotism," but I, who am a 
preacher's eon in the Methodist Church, 
have seen the heart of my mother sink 
down when my father was ordered off, by 
government as absolute as Brigham Young's, 
to live two years in some swampy part of 
the earth for such a salary as could be picked 
up, — marriage fees and presents of sausage 
and sparerib about Christmas thrown in. 

The death of Brigham Young will be, as 
things stand, a benefit to his people. Of 
Brigham's devotion, credulity and constancy 
as a Mormon there can be no doubt. He is 
as sincere a man in his church as Bishop 



THE MORMOX TRIALS. 



45 



Simpson is in the Methodist Church or Judge 
McKean in his. But the old man has been 
cramped up in Utah since 1848. Absolute 
authority has made him vain ; want of travel 
to distant parts has kept his charity from ex- 
panding. To him, the whole earth lies under 
the thatch of the Waljsatch Mountains, and 
he is only aware of the fearful mightiness 
of democratic sentiment in America from 
the few troops camped in his vicinity, from 
the miserable character of the Federal offi- 
cials who go out there to bhickmail him, 
and from the stream of respectful visitors, 
for whom he holds a levee every morning, 
and who butter him with praises, while per- 
haps the same people are inditing letters to 
the East raising a hue and cry against his 
Empire. He will leave behind him in that 
State a name never to be rivaled in the 
future prosperous history of Utah, This 
very old man, against whom the Courts are 
battering, and who may soon be a fugitive 
on the borders of Arizona to avoid the peni- 
tentiary of Salt Lake, — I dare believe the 
fame of Brigham Young is as indissolubly 
bound in the literature and reverence of the 
Rocky Mountain people, as the names of 
La Salle, John Winthrop and Hernando 
Cortez are embedded in other parts of the 
country, 

I was talking one day with a distinguished 
apostle of the Mormon Church, and he used 
this curious illustration : 

" Suppose, Mr. Townsend," he said, 
"that Joseph Smith had been born 3400 
years ago, and Moses in the year 1800, 
A. D., thus reversing the order of their 
several revelations, — which would be the 
harder to believe 1 " 



I replied : " You ask me too much. I 
am not familiar with the story of Moses, 
My notion of Moses is obtained from one of 
Michael Angelo's statues ; he always seemed 
to me to be a fair man." 

"Now," said this apostle, the story of 
Joseph Smith is, that he discovered a set of 
golden plates, and he was divinely endowed 
to translate them. You ask where are 
those plates'? We answer that Joseph 
Smith gave them back to the angel, who 
kept them. Moses on the other hand went 
up into Mount Sinai, taking no witnesses 
with him, and is alleged to have had a fiimi- 
liar talk with the Lord. The J^oid gave 
him two tablets of stone on which the com- 
mandments are engraved ; but Moses never 
showed the people those stone tablets, any 
more than Joseph Smith showed the golden 
plates. When Moses came down from 
Sinai with the tablets, he found the people 
worshipping a golden calf, and it says in the 
ninth chapter of Deuteronomy, that he cast 
down the tablets and broke them to pieces. 
Then he went up into the mountain again, 
as the tenth chapter of Deuteronomy dis- 
closes and was j)t'i"niitted by the Lord, to 
hew himself a new set of tablets, on which 
the commandments were engraved, these 
tablets were put into the ark, and they were 
everlastingly concealed from the public eye. 
Now had Moses been named Joseph Smith, 
the gentile world would have scoffed at this 
story, and would have said that the non- 
appearance of the stone tablets, the breaking 
of the original pair, and the re-engraving of 
an imitation by the prophet himself, were 
all subterfuges such as those which accom- 
panied the chiseling of the Cardiff giant. 



46 



THE ]?IOR]fIO]V TRIALS. 



But you have had proacheil at you for eigh- 
teen hundred years, the legend of Moses, 
and you take it without question while yon 
laugh at the altogether more consistent story 
of the translation of the golden plates. 
Both instances must be accepted by faitii 
and not by reason. Our people out here 
believe equally in the tale of Moses, and in 
that of Joseph, and you who accept one half 
of the gospel, want to put us in jail and 
break us up for believing the other half. 
You came in here just like the Catholic 
priests got into the vales of the Waldenses. 
Failing to convei-t us or rather to unconvert 
us, you begin to persecute us. It is no fault 
of ours that we offend you ; for we left 
civilization fifteen hundred miles behind us, 
in order not to irritate you. We think that 
our revelation treats of matters if possible 
more important to human nature than the 
Old Testament. It solves the problem of 
the past history of Ameiica. It has the 
only new gospel and indigenous prophet and 
seer on this hemisphere. It has grown more 
rapidly than the Jewish jDower, and if it 
were not for our notion on the subject of 
marriage, I believe we would have more 
converts in the United States, than any other 
sect. 

" Mormon Utah is a congregation of all 
the good institutions which you separately 
maintain. It is a house of correction, an 
inebriate asylum, an almshouse, a church, 
an intelligence office, a system of appren- 
ticeship, a commission of emigration, a loan 
office, a college of agriculture, a school of 
mines and manufactures; in short it collects 
from all parts of the earth, the weak, the 
ignorant, and those who need spiritual and 



social reformation, and brings them out here 
removed from temptation and constructs 
them into a useful citizen ey." 

This is a case arising under Judge Mc- 
Kean's system of ruling Mormons off a jury 
in civil as well as criminal trials affecting 
them in any way. Engelljreeht, a liquor 
seller, refused to take out a city license, (the 
licenses here being costly, $300 a month to 
sell spirits over a bar; -1200 a month to sell 
liquDrs wholesale and letail, not to be drank 
on the premises; 1100 a month to keep a 
wholesale liquor store; $50 a month to sell 
ale and beer,) and after being notified of the 
consequences by the Justice of the Peace in 
his ward, one Clinton, the liquors of Engel- 
brecht were poured Into the street. He sued 
Clinton and the officers of the corporation 
for malicious destruction of his stock, under 
a territorial statute, making malicious dam- 
age punishable three times the value of the 
pi'operty destroyed. McKean ruled every 
Mormon off the jury on the ground of bias 
and incapability of giving a verdict accord- 
ing to the evidence. The liquor seller M^on 
the case by the packed jury, and for nineteen 
thousand dollars worth of liquors got an 
award of fifty-seven thousand dollars. The 
case is to be carried up to the Supreme 
Court and pressed for a decision in advance 
of its order, on the ground that this whole- 
sale and indiscriminate trial of cases affect- 
ing the great majority of the people by 
juries selected fi'om an insignificant minority, 
is subversive of justice in Utah, and puts the 
liberty and property of the people at the dis- 
posal of two men — the majority of the Court. 
The Mormons have a superstitious faith in 
the honesty of the Supreme Court of Wash- 



THE MORMOM TRIALS. 



47 



ington, but they regard the Supreme Court 
of Utah as a mixture of fanaticism, dullness 
and draw-poker. If it be decided at Wash- 
ington that McKean's way of nialving up 
juries is legal, the Mormons will quietly 
submit, but it is not probable that the Su- 
preme Court, even as manipulated within 
the past two years, will indorse this brutal 
manner of violating the essential spirit cf 
trial by jury. 

In Utah, as generally in the Territories, 
the Federal administration is loose, discord- 
ant and slip- shod. The late Prosecutor, 
Hempstead, was hated by McKean, for ob- 
jecting to the jury -packing system, and the 
present Prosecutor is appointed by the 
Court only ; the post military commanders 
are invariably friendly with the Mormons, 
because they perceive nothing admirable or 
lovable in the Federal officials. Jud^e 

o 

Strickland frequently smokes cigars and 
whittles sticks while holding court. A 
vague impression, started by the preacher 
"Doctor" Newman, that Grant w^ants a 
general movement made on polygamy, an 
ambrosial notoriety seeker, he devised a trip 
to Utah many months ago, and the Mormons, 
in Democratic fairness, threw open their tab- 
ernacle to him to let him say the worst 
against their theology. Imagine a Method- 
ist Bishop giving up his pulpit to a Mormon 
in like circumstances. Newman now re- 
turns the courtesy of the Mormons by set- 
ting on foot, through the President, this 
whole precipitate assize against polygamy. 
Thus are schemes of statesmanship balked 
by theological pretenders, and shallow 
preachers are given the scope and influence 
of Cardinals like Richelieu and Antonelli. 



Bates, who has been appointed United 
States Attorney for Utah within the past 
few days, is a burnt-out Chicago lawyer, a 
friend of Lyman Trumbull, and a conserva- 
tive man. We shall probably hear no more 
of Basking's ferocious billingsgate, where he 
called Brigham Young a thief, assassin, &c,, 
before the smiling Judge McKean, and re- 
duced the associations even of the livery 
stable where the United States Court is 
held. 

Senator Trumbull says these pi'osecutions 
are out of all equity, and that they should 
be stopped, and polygamy left to its natu- 
ral enemies, prosperity, Gentile influx, opin- 
ion and competition. 

There is no doubt that the successor of 
Brigham Young is already resolved upon by 
that old Moses himself, and that he is ad- 
vised of his nomination. It is George A. 
Smith, cousin to Joseph Smith, and the His- 
torian of the Church, and also at present 
one of the three members of the " First Pres- 
idency." 

A man more unlike Brigham Young it 
would be difficult to conceive. Brigham is 
the incarnation of will and purpose, a mate- 
rialist, a Yankee Turk. George A. Smith is 
the spirit of reverence, gentleness and ac- 
cord, and in his hands Mormonism will cease 
to offend its neighbors, and resolve to a 
quiet, docile, but still numerous and proselyt- 
izing body of worshipers. Smith is very lit- 
tle of a polygamist. He has none of Brig- 
ham's consideration for money and clear- 
headedness upon the great unit of the inter- 
est-bearing dollar. Smith is one of us lit- 
erary folks, a man of the stamp of Thacke- 
ray, Peter Force and Washington Irving — 



48 



THE 9IORIVIOX TRIALS. 



not equal to them in degree, perha])8, ])ut in 
nature the same — a collaborateur, lover of 
traditions and family reminiscences, and a 
pleasing, dignifu-d raconteur and politician. 
lie has no avarice, no love of war, no vin- 
dictiveness, and he is yet a sincere, hale, im- 
movable Mormon, believing in Joseph's rev- 
elations without question. I am told that 
there is no historical society in any county 
or State of the Union so perfectly complete 
in archives as that of the Mormons. The 
recording angel might have gone off on a 
holiday as far as they are concerned ; for 
George A, Smith has kept the account for 
him. 

And yet, this lolling, easy Bohemian has 
energies of his own not to be despised, and - 
Brigham Yoimg is more frequently in his so- 
ciety than with any of the Madames Young. 
He has a wonderful memory, povi^er of lan- 
guage and stump-speaking, and adroit poli- 
tical management. He loves politics and is 
not a bigot. The Mormons have a weakness 
for the Smith family as the Islamites might 
have for the relatives of Mohammed, and 
there never was any Smith with more saga- 
city and bonhotnmie than this one. He is a 
very large, heavy, and self-enjoying man in 
appearance — resembling ex-Senator Toombs, 
of Georgia, but without Toombs' opinionat- 
edness or passion. He weighs as much as 
Brigham Young, wears a brownish auburn 
wig and spectacles, walks with a cane, and 
has a ready smile and a big mouth to spread 
it upon. Although having two or three 
wives, I dare. believe that George Smith is at 
heart a chaste,, tender, and religious husliand, 
father, friend and gentleman. 

Here I close my letter for the present. 



In conclusion, it must be said, seiiously, warn- 
ingly, to the Mormon leaders, that they must, 
by the force of example and edict, stop this 
policy of polygamy ! They are to a very 
great extent still the "guides, philosophers 
and friends " of their masses. Let them put 
their flourishing territory in accord with the 
surrounding civilized populations, take do- 
mestic example from the white man's one 
wife, and not from the Indian's many squaws, 
and be, like a New Testament bishop, " the 
husband of one !" Let them bring Utah 
into the Union as a State, rid themselves of a 
judiciary and Governor responsible only to a 
distant public opinion, and share in the profits 
and comforts of an expanding, a developing, 
and a rich nation. -Of what avail are indus- 
try and polygamy yoked together, the one 
slaving for the other to live ahungered upon 
its proceeds'? Even President Young's mil- 
lions will go thinly around among his numer- 
ous progeny. The present conflict between 
the United States and the polygamous leaders 
may be staved off, but similar troubles will 
arise again and again. The nation will not 
put up with polygamy much longer. Gov- 
ernments and administrations may keep 
hands off, but the danger to polygamy is 
from the power that makes administrations 
and governments — the Democratic jiopulace, 
the public opinion. The very courts and . 
troops now so obnoxious in Ut;ih may one 
day be the refuge of the Mormon people, and 
that necessity for refuge will be when the 
public opinion catches up and overtakes the 
United States Government and supersedes it, 
as it did at Nauvoo. Heaven deliver a poor, 
thrifty and sincere people from that fate, and 
let Heaven make useful for this purpose the 



THE MORMOIV TRIAI.S. 



49 



present leaders of the Mormon Church, so 
that we may see Utah saved from desoLitioii. 
A way seems to arise by which — as under 
GUI" free system such communications shonhJ 
be brought al>out — the Mormon Church, the 
Mormon people, and the true course of law, 
justice and tolerance, may be secured. It 
was proposed at Salt Lake, to several Moi'- 
mons in my presence, by a distinguished 
member of the church. 

Namely : That the Mormon chiefs should 
not trifle with time, nor hesitate upon the 
brink of danger in this age of breech-loaders 
and volunteer soldiering. Let them dismiss 
the freak of an exodus to some other Terri- 
tory, where in a few years the storm against 
polygamy will burst forth again, A forcible 
resistance, in my judgment, they never con- 
templated. Let them believe that many thou- 
sands of Gentiles take pride and interest in 
their past energy and useful acquisitions, and 
desire to see them protected in both and in 
their worship. But polygamy is not only a 
tenet ; it is a practice, and it encounters the 
whole force of the creed and cui-rent of the 
common law of civilization. Here is a way 
to deal with it, extinguish it, and make a 
wholesome and flourishing State out of an 
anomaly. 

Let a convention be called promptly, even 
at once, before Congress gets well under way 
with next session's business. Let this con- 
vention prepare a State constitution and con- 
cede polygamy in return for the right of local 
government, trial by jury, and a share in the 
benefits of representation in the nation. If 
necessary to the dignity and conscience of the 
Mormon people, let them throw in their pre- 
amble or codicil the responsibility for aban- 



doning polygamy in future upon the govern- 
ment they petition, and concede it to the 
cause of peace and the prejudice of the times. 
The counti-y will not be unjust enough to de- 
mand them to violate the duties of paternity 
and wedlock in marriages already contracted, 
where the complaint does not arise within 
the marriage relation. Let them staunchly, 
inviolably agree and bind themselves to keep 
the agreements of this State constitution as 
tliey make it, and to attest the same, let them 
make the oath to sustain monogamous mari- 
tal fidelity in all future marriages, a portion 
of the oflicial oath to betaken by every State 
officer. 

This concession will be statesmanship and 
saci-ilice together on the part of those influ- 
ential apostles, counselors and quorums who 
will bring it about. They will approve 
themsplves worthy to preserve the State they 
have erected, and remove the last cause of 
interference with the civil rights and freedom 
of worship and faith. They will share in the 
benefits of a State to which they are already 
bound by the ties of race, interest, and neigh- 
borhood, and will find compensation for the 
loss of polygamy in riches, respect and sta- 
bility. They will save themselves, by a 
speedy movement of this kind, from such po- 
litical neutralization, I might say annihila- 
tion, as has overtaken the South. For, if 
they do not heed the warning, it may be too 
late. One rasli act, the folly of any wretch, 
may blot out Utah politically, materially, 
ecclesiastically, even as a tradition ! " Now 
is the accepted time, and now is the day of 
salvation !" 

THE END. 



LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 



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